Weekly Worker 456 Thursday November 14 2002
Letters
European CP
Here is my small contribution - a proposal for some guidelines for a new European Communist Party (you can call it ‘European Socialist Alliance party’ if you find it more familiar). This was sent to Rifondazione Comunista. I will try to sum it up with my ‘oxided’ English. Further contributions by your comrades would be welcome.
“The just terminated Social Forum has given me the occasion to verify that some of what I have felt for a long time is shared with many people.
“Our party, just like other communist parties, has an internationalist calling, because of our politics, history and tradition. As relations among countries of the European Union grow closer, a European representative organisation that not only acts as a coordinator, but also is an autonomous, authoritative and representative political organisation, and a landmark for the whole working class in the EU, is urgent.
“The last issue of the Weekly Worker, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, marks Rifondazione Comunista as the political organisation that could lead this transformation process of the European communist parties in a so-called Socialist Alliance, because of its electoral weight and the “growing anti-capitalist sentiment” in Italy (November 6).
“Unfortunately I could not participate in secretary Bertinotti’s expected intervention on a ‘proposal for a European political party’, but all the same here is my own draft proposal. It is formulated in a few - of course - incomplete points, but I think they are basic.
1. The European Communist Party aims to bring together the needs of the European working class, representing them in the European parliament and laying down the guidelines for interventions in Europe.
2. The European Communist Party is an organisation that is autonomous from the national communist parties, though it maintains close connections with them for the purpose of cooperation.
3. The European Communist Party has an important planning role within the European parliament. A board, selected from among the European deputies, will aim to work out a programme for effective interventions in legislature. The programme will be based on the needs of the working class. The national communist parties will work out a platform in order to put the guidelines of the project into practice in their respective countries.
4. The holding of leading positions or duties in the European Communist Party is incompatible with holding similar positions in the national parties.
5. The European Communist Party will run in the election for the European parliament with its own name and symbol, not those of the national parties.”
Stefano Mancini
Rome
Workers’ Europe
Thanks for a very interesting article (Jack Conrad, ‘Their united Europe and ours’ Weekly Worker November 6).
I just want to make a few observations about the Nice Treaty campaign in Ireland. I think socialists were correct to oppose it, given its implications for privatisation of services (revision of article 133) and militarisation (political and security committee). Of course, just because the treaty was passed doesn’t mean that workers are going to lie down and accept privatisation!
The battle lines were quite clearly drawn in this campaign, as all of the bourgeois establishment lined up in favour of the treaty. Understandable, given the nature of the Irish economy. In Britain, where the bourgeoisie are split into pro-Europe and Eurosceptic camps, things are a bit more complicated.
The ‘no’ campaign was overwhelmingly made up of socialist, green, anarchist and republican organisations. However, a small number of reactionaries also campaigned for a ‘no’ vote. These were the neo-fascist anti-choice campaigner, Justin Barrett, and the ex-Stalinist Anthony Coughlan with his National Platform. It was Coughlan who first tried to use xenophobic, anti-immigration arguments. Given his Stalinist past, it is not surprising that Coughlan put great emphasis on economic nationalism. He warned that a common European fiscal policy (which was not even an issue in the Nice Treaty) would - horror of horrors - force Ireland to increase its low rate of corporation tax!
The National Platform is a member of ‘Team’ - described as “a European Alliance of EU critical movements”, the central platform of which is opposition to “the building of a centralised, federal-style EU superstate with common supranational policies”. Also affiliated to Team are the UK Independence Party and the Communist Party of Austria.
Although the Coughlan/Barrett road show was given great media coverage (in an effort to discredit the progressive ‘no’ campaigners), their arguments did not get much of an echo with workers, who were more concerned with issues around privatisation and militarisation. In the end, the number of ‘no’ voters remained the same as during the last referendum, but there was an increased turnout for ‘yes’.
As you point out, it is essential that socialists don’t fall into the trap of implicitly promoting the nation-state as any kind of alternative to the “bosses’ EU”, but instead advance independent working class demands. To that end the Socialist Party changed its slogan from ‘No to a bosses’ Europe’ to ‘For a workers’ Europe’ and brought up the demand of a workers’ charter that would level up wages and social conditions - for instance, raising the minimum wage rate throughout Europe.
The future of the EU is currently dividing the European bourgeoisie at the convention on the future of Europe. As you note, the pro-federalists have the “biggest firepower”. In September, Berlusconi invited seven European Christian Democrat prime ministers to his Sardinian residence to discuss their fear that proposals coming from the convention were “too federalist”. However, given that Europe is heading into a recessionary period, we can’t discount that larger and larger sections of the bourgeois political establishment will make use of more Eurosceptic and nationalistic arguments, as they seek to protect their own national business interests above all else. The euro could be the first casualty.
In this context, socialists will have to think carefully about how to oppose Eurosceptic rhetoric.
Orla Drohan
email
Failed Leninism
Although I would not, by any means, endorse everything the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty says, I agree with them that you still (perhaps subconsciously) retain illusions in Stalinism. This comes out in your devotion to the name ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ and in some of your other arguments.
Indeed, for all your professed Trotskyism, for all your current series re-examining the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and your critique of the major Trotskyist groups (a criticism that does not go sufficiently far as to reprint, let alone engage with, Trotsky’s testament and Madame Trotsky’s criticisms of the post-war degeneration of the Fourth International), you have failed to make any real examination of the history of Leninism outside the Soviet Union.
You debate with others as to which Leninist faction is the true heir. You, and all the others, assume that only the Leninist road to socialism can succeed, and refuse to contemplate any alternative. You fling around the words ‘anarchist’, ‘syndicalist’, ‘councilist’, ‘KAPDist’, or ‘Bordigist’ (ultra-left communists) as terms of abuse, but show no signs of actually knowing what these currents say. As a syndicalist, one gets used to all sorts of views, which are in fact totally incompatible with anarcho-syndicalism, being attributed to us.
Your endless debate is confined to the finer points of Leninist history (the disparaging remarks about anarchists and others being merely used to punctuate this history), but you fail to notice the most elementary points about that history.
Lenin proposed the Bolshevik form of organisation because of the peculiar nature of tsarist Russian society; he did not consider it suitable for all countries. He did not, when he first proposed it, say it was a road to socialism, and he never subsequently claimed that it achieved socialism. He proposed it as a way of achieving a capitalist revolution in Russia.
The organisation he so proposed concentrated power in the hands of the leadership, the developed comrades whose experience and grasp of theory fitted them for the purpose; and it claimed, initially for the party but then for the leadership, the right to dominate workers, against the latter’s subjective judgments. Trotsky, very rightly, then argued that the party leadership would stand in the same position vis-à-vis the rank and file as the capitalist to the worker, that surplus value, in terms of both propaganda, organisation and theory, would all be alienated from the rank and file, and that the party would become a repository of dead labour. Regrettably Trotsky later disowned that work.
As said, Lenin’s aim was to achieve capitalism. He believed that Russia’s capitalists were too craven to take power on their own behalf and so he wished the workers to take power in their stead; it would be a workers’ power that restricted itself to furthering the development of capitalism. When Trotsky, adopting Parvus’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’ to Russia’s conditions, suggested that the workers’ revolution could start within the capitalist one, taking over as the revolutionary force as soon as capitalism triumphed, Lenin predicted that such a policy could lead only to a bizarre tyranny. Even Trotsky, for all that he played a dominant role in the 1905 Petrograd soviet, did not see the soviet as the natural basis of workers’ power, and did not see the connection between soviets and permanent revolution.
However, in 1917 when the February revolution was opening up new opportunities, neither the party nor the masses behaved as Lenin had predicted. In his words: “The party masses were ten thousand times more revolutionary than the party leadership, and the non-party masses ten thousand times more revolutionary than the party masses.” In other words, the revolutionary leadership was a brake on the spontaneity of the revolutionary rank and file, and the revolutionary rank and file a break on that of the ordinary workers and peasants, so much so that the Bolshevik headquarters were picketed by non-party socialists and ordinary workers, demanding that the party pursue a more revolutionary policy.
From April until October Lenin turned his former theories both of what sort of power the party wished to achieve and of party organisation on their head. He berated the party’s “internal leadership” for their timidity, for their prolonged cooperation with capitalist and reformist parties, he encouraged the party masses to disobey the edicts of their leaders and, contrary to all party rules, he appealed directly to non-party socialists and workers. It is hardly surprising that the internal leadership expelled him: he had flouted the rules he, himself, had laid down. As the revolution won, the record has it only that the internal leadership tried to expel Lenin. The fact is that it went through all the stages necessary under the party rules to expel Lenin, and those party members (undoubtedly a minority) who obeyed the party rules and leadership regarded Lenin as expelled. The revolution was made by the soviets, soviets influenced by revolutionaries outside the Bolshevik party and by dissident Bolsheviks (of whom Leon Trotsky was one) who obeyed Lenin rather than the official internal leadership; it was denounced, just before it happened, by that leadership.
‘All power to the soviets’, the slogan and strategy that mobilised the masses and won the revolution, was first advanced by anarchists and maximalists, was taken up by the Mezhraiontii, by the Left Social Revolutionaries, and only then by Lenin and his followers amongst the Bolshevik rank and file. Thus the triumph of the October revolution does not prove the case for a Bolshevik party: it proves exactly the opposite - when it comes to the crunch, a party on Bolshevik lines, even such a party as was created by Lenin himself, handicaps the revolution. The revolution can only win if Leninists abandon Leninism.
Laurens Otter
Shropshire
Kautsky mole
In his article ‘Preparing for power’ comrade Jack Conrad digs himself ever more deeply into a very large reformist hole (Weekly Worker October 31). Despite the categorical statement in the ‘What we fight for’ column that socialism can never come through parliament, we are now told that a parliamentary majority can be the first decisive step on the road to revolution. The Chartists could have won a parliamentary majority as a decisive first step on the road to revolution by militant methods.
But Jack forgets that the militant methods of the bureaucratic military British capitalist state prevented the realisation of such a dream. The Chartists’ revolutionary opposition to the establishment of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of the capitalist state was the social context of workers’ power which would mean universal suffrage - the essence of the demand of the charter - transcending the capitalist state. In other words universal suffrage would establish the commune state. Historically the defeat of the Chartists enabled the bourgeoisie to adopt universal suffrage in safe instalments to strengthen advanced capitalism. Universal suffrage was not incompatible with British capitalism, as Marx believed.
For Jack the spirit of pure democracy is always pushing upward and forward to overcome the formidable undemocratic institutions such as the House of Lords, monarchy, Church of England, BBC, Bank of England, MI5, army, and police. Globally the working class becomes more and more numerous, better organised and educated and able to speak up against capital. That is a relief. The evolutionary spirit of Kautsky lives on.
Any comrade who does not share this naive view of modern capitalism and imperialism is obviously incapable of seeing below the surface of things. Thatcherism, Reaganomics, the new world order, the old CPGB line of reaction of a special kind might seem to contradict the new complacency about capitalism, but, underneath, the old Kautsky mole is digging away.
For comrade Conrad the real choice is economism or bourgeois democracy. Parliament or wage struggles. The pure spirit of democracy, according to the comrade, manifests itself as the struggle of the Luddites, Peterloo, Chartism and the Pentonville Five. But these examples from working class history show a good deal of economic demands and violence. None of these famous working class struggles was a parliamentary struggle. The comrade asserts that fundamentally capitalism has changed since the days of Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Lenin. We have seen the warfare state eclipsed by the welfare state (have we?!). We have seen the forward march of democratic rights, the end of colonial empires (and imperialism?).
For Jack there has been profound change in capitalism. Capitalism no longer exhibits many of the features it did in the days of the most authoritative thinkers in the socialist or communist tradition. But he does not specify, apart from the unconvincing list above, what the profound differences are. Although he does say that fascism is no longer an organic feature of modern capitalism. Hence the enhanced revolutionary role of the House of Commons. If fascism and Bonapartism are no longer an organic feature of capitalism, then the parliamentary road is clear. So Jack Conrad’s assertion is a major piece of revisionism.
We should not play up bourgeois democracy. As Engels wrote to Bebel on December 11 1884, “our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole of the reaction which will group around pure democracy”. In 1848 in Germany, 1917 in Russia, and 1918 in Germany everything reactionary behaved as if it was democratic in order to hold back the revolution until it was safe to use force to attempt to crush the revolution.
Barrie Biddulph
Stoke-on-Trent
Stick with Labour
How sad to see a socialist of Liz Davies’s commitment and ability resign from the Socialist Alliance chair. She follows another enthusiastic ex-Labourite from the executive, Dave Church. It was only a matter of time, no matter what spin is put out about their departure from the executive. It appears that the SA is nothing but an electoral agitational tool of the Socialist Workers Party with comrades Hoveman, Rees and three or four fellow travellers (supposedly non-aligned) running the show, and no doubt the two who have departed had realised this.
The ‘Socialist Alliance Front’ (as it should be known) is failing to bring on board the multitude of disaffected Labour activists. Now I expect the SWP will move on, concentrating on Iraq and the European Social Forum, no doubt using the SA for selective elections where they can run a minor celeb such as Mr Foot and attempting to persuade local branches not to run where a derisory outcome is likely. This is not building an alternative to New Labour: it is another unnecessary diversion from working within the real labour movement, where progress is starting to be made.
I would argue that socialists, both utopian and scientific, can only make sustainable progress by working specifically within the Labour Party in our epoch. Surely short-cutting the struggle, although appealing, leaves such questions as the political role of the trade unions unanswered. Ted Grant and his colleagues predicted at the time of Peter Taaffe’s ‘open party building’ that Militant would collapse - well, they haven’t disappeared, but you must agree they have diminished greatly.
The SWP will never embrace the apparent democracy of the CPGB or AWL groups. They will only (by their superior numbers within the SA) enforce their lack of programme, bad practices and bureaucratic centralism on the rest. The SWP has never ever made serious attempts to build rank-and-file fractions within the trade unions, and that is why they are not enthusiastic about CPGB and AWL calls in this area. It is also why the trade union tops treat the SWP with contempt, because they will never pose a serious threat to the union bureaucrats that need to be removed to forward the socialist cause.
I am disgusted by the leadership of my party, the ‘third way’ nonsense pushed by Monks and co and the Tory policies they have pursued, but until there is a real alternative to Labour, I will continue as a minority of one in my constituency and speak out for socialism, and argue for democratising the political fund at my union branch.
If my union disaffiliates, and if all the main left groups dissolve themselves into a real new workers’ party, which attracts the labour movement away from the Labour Party, then I will join such an organisation. Alas, I fear the SA will not evolve into that organisation with the SWP at the helm.
By the way, congratulations on a very good website. Along with In defence of Marxism you must be one of the best.
Tony Humphreys
email
Economistic
I have been going over the Scottish question again and find myself returning to previous conclusions and it seems to me the CPGB’s position is not sufficiently thought out. It seems that the GB part of the CPGB has the upper swing.
This concept of a “historically constituted working class” - is there any other sort? The working class is a product of universal capitalist development. Perhaps you need to be more specific here. I don’t like guessing what you mean by it, but perhaps it means the TUC plus the English language. However, I don’t want to confound your vagueness.
You say “separatism would indeed weaken the UK state but also the working class”. This seems to suggest that if it did not weaken the working class then that separatism would be progressive. It is just the type of nationalism that does not weaken the working class that is not progressive. This goes directly to the question. Does it weaken the working class?
Lenin not only recognised the right to secede, but supported campaigning for it - arguing that it strengthened ties between workers. No nation could secede under your conditions because they share the same state. Ireland was once part of the British state. Does a stretch of water make the difference? Or does the presence of the major British trade unions in the Six Counties affect the struggle for a united Ireland?
I think the CPGB is taking an economistic approach. This is a democratic question and surely that should unite workers and not divide them. What divides workers is the chauvinism of the big state. In this case England. To recognise the right to self-determination but to be opposed to campaigning for it seems a tad hypocritical. Lenin did say that not advocating it was a matter of tactics. I can’t see him anywhere actively opposing it.
Paul Anderson
email
Wild invention
Jack Conrad reckons that I am engaged in an “anti-unity offensive” against AWL-CPGB unity (Weekly Worker November 5). Unity would be good. Serious political debate, the precondition for systematic collaboration, would certainly be good.
Jack responds on the political question of Stalinism by changing the subject and throwing in an accusation against the AWL so wild that it can have no purpose except to deflect attention. It concerns the islamist resistance in Afghanistan in 1980-88. Why has that issue come up?
Recap. The Weekly Worker reprinted an article from 1982 on the April 1978 Stalinist coup in Afghanistan (October 11 2001). It compared that coup, at length and without disfavour, to the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Mark Fischer, introducing it, praised the article as excellent proof that the Stalinist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan had led “a genuine democratic revolution”.
In his ‘Critical notes’, this September, Sean Matgamna of the AWL suggested that the reprint reflected intellectual hangovers from the CPGB/WW’s Stalinist period. Mark Fischer, responding, wrote: “We were not ‘Stalinists’ in 1981 ... our previous stance [before the mid-1990s] had far more of ‘Trotskyism’ about it than ‘Stalinism’ ...” I responded, quoting a few excerpts from Jack’s 1992 book, From October to August. The book affirmed retrospective support for the Russian invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), for the Russian military occupation of Afghanistan (1980-88), and for martial law in Poland (1981); semi-support for the conservative attempted coup in the USSR (1991).
I wrote: “There is no shame in coming to think that one started off at the wrong place in politics ... 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?”
Jack does deny it. He claims that his “general approach” on the USSR in that period was “essentially no different from ‘commonplace’ Trotskyism, Leon Trotsky included”. In 1992 Jack himself was clearer about the radical difference between his stance and any recognisable Trotskyism: “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.”
Does Jack try to sustain his claim? No, he does not. Instead, he changes the subject and sends us off chasing the wildest of accusations: “In the 1980s,” he claims, “AWL leaders were fond of speaking about CIA-sponsored islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan as ‘my kind of people’ ...” The CPGB/WW’s support for the Russian imperialist military occupation of Afghanistan is public record. So is the AWL’s stand for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan, and, in that sense, our siding with the islamist-led revolt of the peoples of Afghanistan.
That we considered the islamists “our kind of people” is off-the-wall invention. In our first calls for Russian withdrawal, at the start of 1980, we wrote about “the utterly reactionary character of the opposition” and “the imperialist-backed reactionary rebels” (Workers’ Action No166). After Russian withdrawal in 1988, we sided with the PDPA rump against the islamists, with the slogan ‘Defend the cities’. A 1985 pamphlet of ours is available on the web at http://archive.workersliberty.org/publications/readings/trots/afgh.htm.
Snap out of it, Jack!
Martin Thomas
AWL
Iran protests
Thousands of Iranian students have demonstrated calling for the release of all political prisoners and against a death sentence passed on a reformist islamist academic, Aghajari. He is alleged to have committed blasphemy during a speech this summer.
Aghajari, a close ally of the ‘reformist’ faction of the regime, had questioned the issue of ‘imitation of islamic guidance’, a pivotal part of Shia islam. He is reported to have told his audience at a lecture in Hamadan that humans are not monkeys and do not need to imitate anyone.
The demonstrations started on November 9 when a group of about 500 students lit a fire outside the Tehran University campus gates and chanted: “Political prisoners should be released!” and “Our problem is the judiciary!”
By November 12 a boycott of lectures at Tehran University turned into a demonstration within the campus, where the students shouted slogans against Khamenei, Iran’s supreme clerical leader, and the previous president, Rafsanjani.
A leaflet sent by the Islamic Student Association of Isfahan Sanati University to Workers Left Unity Iran reminds Iran’s islamic leaders that on paper the constitution guarantees the rights of “communists”, yet even islamic scholars are not free to express their opinions.
Workers Left Unity Iran gives its full support to the student protest movement and calls on academics, student organisations, trade unions and political organisations to defend Iranian students’ demands for political freedom.
Although the death sentence against Aghajari should be seen as part of an ongoing battle between various factions of the regime, the fact that a close ally of the Iranian president can be sentenced to death for a harmless comment shows the limitations of islamic ‘freedom’ in Iran, where tens of thousands of communists and socialists have been executed over the last 23 years for no other crime than opposing a religious state.
Workers Left Unity Iran
London
Web protests
The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka call on all those committed to the defence of democratic rights to condemn the death threats made by local Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) officials against members of the SEP on the island of Kayts in the north of Sri Lanka.
On September 6 local LTTE official Semmanan made the first death threat at a meeting of the Amphihainagar Fishermen’s Cooperative Union, an organisation founded by the SEP. This was in response to the refusal of the union to agree to Semmanan’s demand that it hand over a substantial sum of money for a new LTTE office.
Semmanan told the gathering that the LTTE did “not allow this type of party”. He warned that the SEP could expect similar treatment to that suffered by the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991 by a suicide bomber. On September 27 Semmanan’s deputy, Arunthavan, intervened at a union meeting to repeat the death threats. Both men claimed they were speaking on behalf of the entire LTTE leadership.
The WSWS and SEP call on all those who cherish fundamental democratic rights to demand that the LTTE withdraw and repudiate the death threats made against SEP members and guarantee the rights of the SEP to engage in its political work, free from harassment and intimidation.
Chris Marsden
World Socialist Web Site
Web junk
I frequently read your paper online, so in the absence of spare cash for a subscription, allow me to offer a tweak for your website.
There is a minor problem viewing your pages in browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. In the MS web browser, it looks great. In any web browser other than Microsoft’s, the quote marks are rendered as question marks. It is also unreadable for users of screen readers for the partially sighted and blind.
You’ve got the best edited socialist site I know of. Why run all that great content on the products of one of the pillars of mega-capitalism? On the server that most web security analysts recommend avoiding like the plague?
Please do us all a favour, and ditch the Microsoft proprietary junk. In fact if you do, I promise to finally take out a subscription.
Jon Fox
Oxford
