Weekly Worker 662 Thursday March 1 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Letters

Biased reporting

Whilst the report of the London Campaign for a Marxist Party meeting was generally good and reasonably accurate, I have one complaint and one point that needs more emphasis (‘What kind of programme’, February 22) .

At the meeting I argued that the campaign must break out of the narrow sectarian tramlines it is heading down - where Lenin (min-max) takes on Trotsky (transitional). Was Lenin a Trotskyist or vice versa? The ‘min-max v transitional’ debate is a dead end.

One of my main points was we need a different direction. I deliberately avoided the terms ‘minimum’, ‘maximum’ and ‘transitional’ in explaining my argument. These were mentioned mainly at the end in response to a question from Nick Rogers. I argued that the theory of democratic permanent revolution led to the conclusion that the communist programme should be divided into a democratic programme and an international socialist programme.

I was therefore disappointed to see how this argument was presented in the introductory paragraph reporting the meeting. You would expect that a serious paper would identify the three positions at the start without bias. Instead readers are told by implication there were two sensible positions, min-max (Lenin/Jack Conrad) and transitional (Trotsky/Gerry Downing), “plus the eccentric ‘min-max-trans’ theory” of the Revolutionary Democratic Group.

In the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks used both minimum and transitional programmes, as well having a maximum programme. Having all three is therefore something Marxists need to recognise and understand. It should not be dismissed out of hand. Otherwise we are reflecting the fact that England has had no experience of revolution for the last 300 years and is more comfortable with ‘sensible’ reformist programmes.

I proposed using the terms democratic programme and international socialist programme as a way forward. Of course, the RDG does refer to the validity of minimum, transitional and maximum programmes. But neither myself nor the RDG has ever heard ‘min-max-trans’ before - a formula which surely reflects your own misunderstanding.

Using the term “eccentric” in the opening paragraph of a report not only shows ignorance of the Bolshevik experience, but suggests biased reporting and contempt for the audience. Instead of letting the arguments speak for themselves and letting the readers assess their relative merits, the Weekly Worker wants to twist our minds from the word go. Fearful that workers might have wrong thoughts, the paper provides a none-too-subtle warning sign.

We live in a period of reaction, where the bourgeoisie promotes reactionary views and conservative attitudes not only in society as a whole but within the revolutionary movement itself. It always amazes me how deeply conservative and resistant to new revolutionary ideas and perspectives many so-called Marxists are.

Dave Craig
South London

Abstract democracy

Phil Kent’s reply (Letters, February 22) to Michael Little (February 15) illustrates perfectly the theoretical problems of the CPGB in severing ‘democracy’ in the abstract (pure or extreme) from its class base. Let us follow the logic of Phil’s reply.

Castro declares on his deathbed that he will allow ‘the people’ to decide in open elections. The Miami contras, funded by a limitless supply of dollars, would swamp the island in pro-imperialist propaganda. They would bribe some officials and assassinate all who opposed. The mafia would have its brothels back on the morrow of the election. The Cuban health service, the education system and all those social gains made since the revolution, by far the best in Latin America and far better than those afforded to the inhabitants of inner-city ghetto America, would be privatised in double-quick time, as would all public utilities and industries.

This would be a defeat for the working class on a massive scale in the whole region, Venezuela in the first place, and internationally. Castro led an enthusiastic, popular revolution, one paralleled by Tito in Yugoslavia. Comrade Phil light-mindedly ignores the political significance of these very material gains, the reason that the Castro regime continues to be so popular.

Comrade Little is apparently “not an apologist for Stalinism, but an out and out supporter of it”. Coming from a group which claims the heritage of CPGB historians like James Klugmann - who followed Stalin in labelling Trotskyists fascists in that unwithdrawn pamphlet From Trotsky to Tito for demanding the restoration of soviet (workers’) democracy in the Soviet Union and calling for a political revolution to overthrow that regime whilst preserving the economic base for workers’ democracy, the nationalised planned economy - this is rich indeed. The CPGB did toy with the notion of characterising the USSR as a degenerate workers’ state in the early 90s but decided to follow the path of many former uncritical defenders and present the obverse of their old coin.

Trotskyists have no reason to change their analysis of the former Soviet Union, as developed in Trotsky’s greatest contribution to Marxism, The revolution betrayed. Castro destroyed the typeface of that book and arrested the Cuban Trotskyists in one of his first acts of repression of the political rights of the Cuban working class. Despite the capitulation of some so-called Trotskyists to Tito and Castro, we do not have any problem defending the deformed workers’ state of Cuba by calling for a political revolution to overthrow the proto-Stalinist regime, restore workers’ democracy by giving real democratic life to workers’ councils whilst at the same time repelling the US and the Miami contras arms in hand.

I am aware that these arguments are relatively complex, but the motivation to defend workers’ material gains (bear in mind the fate of the east European and Russian working class after the fall of the Berlin wall) might inspire some deep thought on the matter. If The revolution betrayed does not convince, I cannot think of a better book than John Lister’s Cuba: radical face of Stalinism to explain the origins and the political nature of the Castroite regime and the tasks of the Cuban working class.

Gerry Downing
North London

Fundamental

The ‘present’ CPGB’s laudable aim of organising “communists, revolutionary socialists and all politically advanced workers into a Communist Party” is hardly achievable while those very elements remain so divided.

On the one hand, there are internationalists, like myself, who recognise the existence of uneven, political and economic development and therefore contend that the transitional, lower phase of communism, which we call socialism, initially involves the revolutionary establishment of socialist nation-states. This was the general perspective adopted by the ‘original’ CPGB.

On the other hand, there are those who reject this and insist, like the ‘present’ CPGB, that all forms of “nationalist socialism” are reactionary and anti-working class.

So, while it is possible for all these elements to participate in discussion on various issues and to even join in common actions, this fundamental division still persists.

Jerry Spring
London

Extinction

Tommy Teutel (Letters, February 22) berates me for my advocacy of airships as a non-polluting form of transport (February 15). “How about going back to horse-drawn carriages, sailing ships and water mills as well?” he asks. The by-product of horses was a lot more useful than the exhausts from cars, water mills are still in use and there is a design for sailing ships that generate power from rotating sails. So don’t write off ‘old-fashioned’ technology.

If global warming is the product of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, then humans can at least stop some of its worse results by adopting safe, renewable forms of energy, such as wind and solar power and maybe nuclear fusion. But capitalism, with its eye on the short-term profit, will not invest in this to the extent needed.

At the time of the ice age modern humans were living in Africa and only spread out as the ice retreated. The species that lived nearest to the ice, the Neanderthals, became extinct. It is known that food shortages made cannibals of them. Is Tommy Teutel a follower of Juan Posdas, who thinks UFOs are the product of a socialist economy? He also thought that humanity could survive an atomic war.

The idea that billions of humans can survive by decamping to another planet is plain daft. Humanity would need to construct ships that travelled faster than the speed of light and on which humans could live for decades. I can’t see capitalism investing in that. Either we save our planet or our species faces extinction.

Terry Liddle
London

Wind-up

Tommy Teutel’s letter last week has to be a wind-up.

Unless you think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report was a worldwide conspiracy by climate scientists, you have to accept one of its main conclusions: that there’s a “90% certainty” that global warming is caused by human CO₂ emissions.

The conclusion is fairly clear: we need to reduce those emissions. If they are allowed to go beyond 500 parts per million, finding “more conducive” areas for agriculture will be a near impossibility. Human survival during last the ice age is hardly a great CV for the job of supporting six billion people, as desertification increases, coastal plains are submerged and populations are displaced.

Nor is it a sufficient material basis for a socialist society. As for colonising other planets - dream on.

A survey of the left press over the past month reveals a few articles or paragraphs on this issue, mostly consisting of truisms offering no practical programme whatsoever. The muted reaction of Socialist Worker has prompted a few readers’ letters. For the SWP, this is virtually the equivalent of a tendency declaration and internal bulletin. There also appears to be an inverse relationship between an organisation’s political proximity to a major oil-producing state and the column-inches devoted.

There are two exceptions: Socialist Resistance has held a conference on the environmental crisis and developed the beginnings of a programme; and Green Left Weekly in Australia has argued against expanding coal mining there and for a move to renewable energy. Precisely the sort of issue where a programme must be developed alongside the unions.

It’s clear that most of the scientific work has been done by the greens and environmentalists. Few socialists are sufficiently keyed up on the arguments to be credible - for example, on nuclear power versus renewables, an argument which will certainly rage in the near future. Even if they are, they haven’t been given ‘the line’ yet and so generally don’t intervene in these debates.

Yet, the greens actually fail the test on practical solutions because they are wedded to the programme of small-scale, localised economics and operating within the framework of capitalism.

A socialist environmental programme is long overdue.

Alex Nichols
email

Quick and easy

The idea of restoring the airship may not be so far-fetched. In the 1970s, when people were first worrying about a fuel crisis, a comrade told me about a designer who was working on new airships. With new materials, he believed the dangers that dogged the first use of these transports could be avoided. Whether capital would be invested in such a project depends on how much profit is foreseen. These days private capital, particularly in Britain, looks for quick and easy gain, and expects the public to guarantee it.

We should not make the mistake of thinking technology is ‘objectively’ progressive or develops in a straight line. After all, you could have derided the idea of going ‘back to the windmill’ at one time, but look around and you will see wind-powered turbines generating power both for local use and the national grid. Worldwide use of wind-powered generation has quadrupled since 2000.

Charlie Pottins
email

Think again

So, Marxists view religion as the “world view of an oppressing class”, according to Michael Little in last week’s Weekly Worker (Letters, February 22). Yep, religion is a capitalist con trick to delude the clearly dim workers.

Really? Firstly, how can a Middle Eastern carpenter be responsible for advancing the cause of capitalism, centuries before it even turned up, in Europe? Talk about foresight.

Secondly, Michael misses the egalitarian ethos of christianity. “You are all brothers and have only one master”, as the Bible puts it. Hardly rightwing, is it?

Thirdly, Jesus criticised the authorities of his time. He rejected their hypocrisy - and looked what happened to him. Jesus, a lackey of those with power? Hardly.

I think (I almost said ‘pray’) that Michael thinks again!

Graeme Kemp
email

Reductionist

I was disappointed by Gordon Downie’s article on composer John Adams (‘Soundtracks for the new American century’, February 15).

On what evidence does Gordon base his labelling of Adams as a “neo-conservative composer”, let alone his even more sweeping claim that classical minimalism “has an overtly political function as a vehicle for neo-conservative composers to rebrand or resuscitate tonality and restore musical materials or forms that objective historical processes of development have already superseded”?

Composing a piece like ‘On the transmigration of souls’ that focuses on the personal bereavement caused by the 9/11 attacks hardly demonstrates any such thing. Is it somehow inherently rightwing to be moved by that?

Perhaps Gordon has forgotten the controversy over Adams’ opera The death of Klinghoffer? This piece depicted events around the hijacking of the passenger liner, Achille Lauro, by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, which resulted in the death of Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Adams was accused of “romanticising terrorists”, “anti-Americanism” and even “anti-semitism” for portraying PLF members as human beings who, no matter how wrong-headed their tactics, might actually have believed they were fighting for a just cause rather than simply being evil monsters. That really doesn’t seem like the behaviour of a neo-con.

Beyond the specifics of Adams’ personal politics, though, it’s a pity that Gordon interprets music in such a reductionist, almost socialist-realist, way, whereby the value of a work of art is judged solely in terms of the political messages that can be gleaned from it.

Steve Cooke
Stockton-on-Tees

Omission

In response to the Rotten Elements (Letters, February 22), I would suggest a more significant omission from the CPGB’s Draft programme than a policy on art is a policy on science.

Gordon Downie
Cardiff

Art theory

I can see a solution to the Rotten Elements’ dismay at the CPGB’s programme vis-à-vis culture.

I suggest they join the party and form its cultural heart. If the CPGB has no theory of art, then my theory for the lack of a theory is that there are no artists in the CPGB.

Tommy Teutel
email

Tough position

‘Mobilise the dispossessed’ was a nice article and realistic (February 22).

It’s true that Iranians workers should fight politically against the present pro-capitalist and neoliberal government. But to fight against US imperialism, to stop the chance of war, at present Iranians workers should support their government’s position too.

Yes, it’s a tough position ...

Sanjib Sinha
email

Meacher empire

New Labour deputy leadership candidate Michael Meacher MP and his wife have an empire worth £2 million and owns nine properties. All this when millions of people cannot afford one home.

Mr Meacher is just another bourgeois politician.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

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