Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

Letters

SSP nationalism
Firstly, let it be clear that I am by no means an unconditional supporter of the CPGB and less still a member of the party, but the unforgivable distortions of what their position is on the national question, as espoused by Scottish Socialist Party nuts, need addressing (Letters, April 14).

Desiring for the British working class to be united against its bourgeois state is quite different from “British national chauvinism”. The former is a legitimate Marxist goal, and the latter is, in this context, an empty slur hurled gratuitously at the CPGB by Scottish pseudo-socialists desperate to justify their own reactionary agenda, which is undeniably of a broadly nationalist character. Whatever the SSP’s other policies, its goal of a ‘Scottish workers republic’ is one intent upon segregating the Scottish state from the British one, and therefore by necessity the Scottish working class from that of England, Wales and Ireland.

The fact that communists oppose Scottish nationalism, and so does the British state, is as irrelevant as the fact that communists oppose the occupation of Iraq, and so does the British National Party. Are we eligible to join the Tory Party, just because we share their contempt for the Brussels bureaucracy? SSP nationalism may well be “anti-racist”, but it remains divisive along class lines.

Comrades, we are above this sectarian bollocks! A party to act as vanguard for the British working class is a minimum requirement, and the first step the revolutionarily conscious element of British society can make towards a Communist Party of Europe. Scottish nationalism is a step in the opposite direction, represents a deviation from political progression and should be met with contempt by socialists from all countries, not least by those from Scotland itself.
Martin Aldridge
Northampton

Nasty nats
Cripes, I never realised that the Scottish Socialist Party was the chosen home of raving nationalists (Letters, April 14). I always suspected that you in the Weekly Worker were exaggerating, or being just plain silly, calling the SSP ‘national socialist’.

After the venomous letters from Messrs Patrick, Caple and McGregor I am having to rethink. It all depends on whether or not they are isolated loons, or the tip of a rotten iceberg?
Certainly the fact that John Patrick is an official SSP spokesperson is deeply worrying.
Clive Tate
Cornwall

Not ultra
I’m not sure what useful purpose Alan Fox or the CPGB think is served by repeatedly referring to the Republican Communist Network (platform of the Scottish Socialist Party) as “ultra-nationalist” (‘Vote SSP - critically’, April 14).

For those who would like to discover for themselves the real character of the RCN you can visit our website at www.republicancommunist.org. You might be surprised.
Bob Goupillot
RCN chair

Real enemy
I read with interest John Patrick’s letter (Weekly Worker April 14). He seems to be under the illusion that there are left (or right) groups in Britain who are not infiltrated by one security service or another. Rather than making accusations which are simply not a surprise to any intelligent person, he should realise that both the SSP’s and the CPGB’s real enemy is the British state and turn his anger on them.
Daniel Huckfield
email

Laboured sectarian
John Watson cannot grasp how any Labour candidate can be described as working class (Letters, April 14). He also recoils from the idea of voting for anyone who belongs to the same party as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Easy. Labour remains what Lenin and Trotsky called a bourgeois workers’ party. And in the 1920s and 30s both men advocated that communists in Britain vote for Labour candidates … yes, including even rotten misleaders such as MacDonald and Attlee.

Today, the task of communists, as opposed to sectarians, is to highlight the living contradiction that is the Labour Party, a contradiction that became particularly acute over the Iraq war.
Samuel Esselt
Milton Keynes

Vote SSP, IWCA
Enso White writes: “The purpose of any communist support for Respect, left Labour, Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales and other such candidates is not to passively second-guess who is most likely to turn out on a picket line. That would be stupid” (Letters, April 14).

A fine sentiment, but I would politely suggest that perhaps Enso should be looking closer to home in his use of this polemic. To remind Enso and other Weekly Worker readers of the passive second-guessing involved in editor Peter Manson’s justification for voting for SWP members: “... hopefully they could act as workers’ tribunes in parliament, on the picket line, in the press”. Stupid indeed!

Enso is completely missing the point when he writes against me: “He argues against voting for working class candidates who demand the withdrawal of British troops on May 5.” The point I am making is that Socialist Workers Party members who are Respect candidates are only ‘working class’ in a sociological sense. In a political sense they have abandoned the struggle for working class independence through their involvement in the Respect mini-popular front. If they were really standing on a platform of working class independence then I would likely support voting for them.

Enso goes on to explicitly compare a vote for leftwing Respect candidates with Lenin’s call for a vote to the Labour Party in the 1920s. Quite an amazing comparison really, as it completely disappears the question of the open class collaboration that lies at the very heart of Respect. Discussing the question of whether joining the Labour Party would amount to class collaboration, Lenin had this to say when speaking at the 2nd Congress of the Third International:

“When, in this connection, comrade Serrati speaks of class collaboration, I affirm that this will not be class collaboration. When the Italian comrades tolerate, in their party, opportunists like Turati and co - ie, bourgeois elements - that is indeed class collaboration. In this instance, however, with regard to the British Labour Party, it is simply a matter of collaboration between the advanced minority of the British workers and their vast majority” (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm).

I would hope that Enso can spend some time to reflect on this important difference between the Labour Party in the 1920s and Respect today. As a result he might reconsider whether a vote for candidates of a rightward-moving mini-popular front grouping goes any way to strengthening working class independence, which both I and the CPGB (at least on paper) profess to see as the central question in the coming election.

Finally I would point out that I have not argued for a boycott of the elections, as Enso implies. It would seem to me that, despite weaknesses in their electoral platforms, both the Independent Working Class Association and SSP are worthy of support, as they both openly stand for the independence of our class.
John Watson
email

Vote anti-war
Anti-war veteran Mick Deer, formerly a Socialist Workers Party member until he was expelled from the group a couple of years back for ‘conspiratorial activities’ (factionalising), has declared that in the absence of any credible anti-war candidate in the Leeds Central constituency he will stand under an independent banner.

The alternative in this constituency to comrade Deer’s election are the sitting Labour MP, international development secretary Hillary Benn, and British National Party student organiser Mark Collett. But at the last meeting of Leeds Stop the War Coalition co-chair Sally Kinkaide (SWP) slammed any suggestion that the Leeds coalition should support Mick - or any other candidate, as it was not in the nature of a ‘broad coalition’ to do so.

At the next meeting I will be pushing for a motion to be passed along the following lines: “At the forthcoming general elections on May 5, Leeds STWC critically supports the endeavours of any working class candidate standing in principled opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq by imperialist forces.”

I urge all those who are in support of this motion to come along to the next LSTWC meeting at the civic hall, central Leeds. Afterwards we will also have an opportunity to discuss what comrade Deer has in mind for his election campaign.
Sachin Sharma
Leeds

Consistency
SWPer Nick Bird has fun childishly criticising Peter Manson (Letters, April 14). According to comrade Bird, it is inconsistent to demand disciplinary action against Kevin Williamson - a regular columnist in Scottish Socialist Voice - because of his ultra-nationalist call for a boycott of all SSP candidates in the ‘Brit’ general election on May 5. After all, this hardly squares with the CPGB’s position of only advocating a vote for working class candidates in Respect.

Comrade Bird is, of course, quite right. In terms of formal logic. But when have communists ever claimed to be guided by formal logic?

Communists take as their starting point the needs of humanity and the project of working class self-liberation. This is crystallised in the form of a democratically agreed and testable programme. The CPGB has published and uses a draft programme which maps out the road to state power and achieving communism.

Here, in this draft programme, the reader will find the dialectical logic of communists. As a necessary goal communists are committed to working class unity. Something which can only be achieved in opposition to all manifestations of nationalism and opportunism.

In that light it would appear that comrade Manson was being perfectly consistent.
Enso White
London

Political alliance
No, comrade Keller, you cannot take the absence of a reply to your previous letter as “agreement by CPGB comrades that there is an important distinction between ‘political alliances’ and ‘fighting alliances’” (Letters, April 14).

My own failure to respond was more a question of exasperation that comrade Keller refuses to accept the obvious: that a ‘military alliance’ must of necessity be a political alliance too. In the case of Iraq, his ‘military support’ for the islamists and Ba’athists is no such thing: it is political support for the anti-imperialist part of their programme and for their resistance to the occupation.

When the Bolsheviks entered into a “fighting alliance” with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (not Kerensky, as comrade Keller states) against Kornilov, that too was a political alliance, however fleeting. Similarly, if communist forces in Iraq entered into some episodic alliance with reactionary anti-imperialists, that would also be a political decision in the furtherance of political aims.

It is perfectly acceptable to enter into such alliances with our secondary enemies in order to concentrate our fire on our main enemy. In the words of Trotsky, it is permissible for communists to strike up a (political) alliance “with the devil himself” if we believe our cause will be furthered - so long as we do not call the devil an angel. Thus the Bolsheviks negotiated a political arrangement with kaiser Germany in 1917, whereby Lenin was able to travel to Russia in a sealed train (even comrade Keller would find it difficult to squeeze this alliance into his ‘military’ category, by the way).

The real distinction, then, is not between ‘military’ and ‘political’. It is between principled political alliances and unprincipled political alliances.
Peter Manson
South London

SA ultimatums
Mike Macnair accuses me, amongst others, of trying “to prevent the implementation of the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform March 12 conference decisions”. Yet later on he describes these decisions as being “very doubtfully consistent with one another”.

That’s putting it mildly: they contradict one another. So, by implementing one decision, you are bound not to implement another, and vice versa. What I was trying to do was clarify the basis on which the next Socialist Alliance conference in the autumn will be called. Will it be on the basis of campaigning for an SSP-type party - or “multi-tendency socialist party”, as Mike calls it? Or will it be on the basis of a federal structure of the left groups like the Socialist Alliance from 1996? You could read both into the March 12 conference decisions - for example, A3 and A9 of resolution C-D.

My resolution proposed that the basis for the autumn conference should be a campaign for a multi-tendency party. The second part stated that it should be made clear to any left group that this was the case and therefore if they affiliated to the Socialist Alliance they would have to accept being a tendency when such a party was formed. This seems to me straightforward and honest. Mike sees it as “an ultimatum to the groups”.

It strikes me, on the contrary, that if we go ahead with a federal structure without saying that at some point we want a party, then we are being dishonest and accepting an ultimatum from those groups who do not want such a party - for example, the SP, AWL and SWP. And basically, of course, we will never get such a party because one of the large groups will put a veto on it, or close the SA down again.

The reason why some comrades want a rerun of a federal Socialist Alliance that ended in disaster completely escapes me. Surely Marxists are supposed to learn from history, not make the same mistakes again. And the worst thing is to learn the mistakes, as the CPGB seems to have done, but then keep quiet and vote for the opposite of what you believe - like the SWP in Respect. That seems to me what Mike Macnair did on April 9.
Dave Spencer
Coventry

No charity
I noticed a while ago you published an article about Make Poverty History and the fact that your party was of the opinion that the SWP was bowing to charity “yet again”. I have just two things to say about this.

The first is that this is a tad hypocritical, as I seem to recall that immediately after the Asian tsunami you gave people recommendations on which charities to give to. The CPGB is bowing to charity here. Also, I might add that Make Poverty History is not a charity. It is in fact a form of pressure group designed to campaign and act for social justice and reform of present trade rules.
Simon Byrne
SWP

Utopian
The analysis contained in the ‘Our epoch’ section of your Draft programme fails to address the experience of central planning and whether it came to function as a fetter on the development of capital. The planned economies could copy what the most advanced capitalism could produce - although North Korea and Cuba must have problems with the internet.

Any notion of central planning is likely to have to wait until all that can be created within capitalism has been created, and that’s probably at least 100 years away. Only then may capitalist relations predominantly become a fetter on production. Until then any new planned economy programme is utopian socialism, as described by Engels in Socialism utopian or scientific.
Ian Mordant
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