Letters
Howler
Comrade James Turley accuses the CPGB Provisional Central Committee, and the organisation as a whole, of suffering from “scholastic pedantry” and a “bizarre fixation on extra-parliamentary fighting formations” with regard to the British National Party. Indeed, we are “oh-so gullibly” falling for Nick Griffin’s “bullshit” and - perhaps worse of all - making a “bonfire” out of dialectics (Letters, July 30).
Serious accusations. But, of course, all totally unfounded. Rather it is comrade Turley himself who is imprisoned by dogma, not the PCC and the CPGB majority. Sounding more like a leftist than a Marxist, and in that sense acting as an attorney for the wider dogmatic British left, the comrade insists - with biblical certainty - that the BNP must be fascist. Why? Because the founders of the BNP (John Tyndall, etc) were undeniably creepy neo-Nazis and Hitler-worshippers. Therefore the BNP of today must still be fascist. Or, in other words, once a fascist, always a fascist.
However, this is clearly not the case. Any more than the reality of capitalism’s specific historical origins therefore means that it is “inherently racist” or that the British state is somehow “institutionally racist”. This is to adopt a fundamentally ahistorical and hence non-Marxist approach. No, the task of serious Marxists, alongside a ruthlessly scientific study of the past, is to identify and locate historical change or discontinuity as well as continuity (in that sense, you could argue, not too dissimilar to how communists should engage with evolutionary theory).
And, of course, the analogy comrade Turley uses to ‘prove’ his point (that the PCC has taken leave of its senses, etc) is a positive howler - foot well and truly shot. Apparently, to dispute the “fascist character” of the BNP is the “equivalent” to “somebody in the 1980s really believing in Sinn Féin’s official separation from the Provos” (original emphasis).
Frankly, desperate stuff. During the 1980s the Provisional IRA palpably existed, had its “extra-parliamentary fighting formations”, and enjoyed a substantial base of support amongst the oppressed Catholic-nationalist community. Straightforward fact. Equally as obviously, Sinn Féin had to maintain the “separation” line in order to remain a legal organisation - simple as that. So, yes, the comrade is quite right to say that anyone who genuinely believed that the Sinn Féin/IRA were not effectively one and the same was being - at best - a little on the naive side. And Marxists are not naive, one hopes.
But the crucial point is that we live in a totally different set of circumstances now, whether you like it or not. Self-evidently, the IRA has been dissolved and disbanded - officially and in reality. After all, just ask Sinn Féin’s coalition partner, the Democratic Unionist Party. Does comrade Turley really believe the DUP would even entertain the idea of running a joint administration with Sinn Féin if it thought for a single second that the IRA still existed and maintained a link with it?
Similarly, the BNP we all know and hate - the one that this June won two seats in the European parliament, thus doing two better than the entire combined far left - today does not organise as a fascist group (“extra-parliamentary fighting formations” or otherwise), nor does it attempt to recruit or win wider general political support as a fascist (least of all a neo-Nazi) group. To do so, obviously, would be to invite electoral suicide - and constant, extremely unwanted, ridicule from the mass media and mainstream society as a whole.
Thus, according to its constitution, the BNP is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make-up of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948” - not to mention proposals for “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home” (tinyurl.com/bt75h).
Repulsive and reactionary? Yes. Deeply nationalist and chauvinist? Yes. Racist? Yes (despite the BNP’s own shamefaced denials). But just a few decades ago the mainstream right would have used virtually identical language. The left in the 60s and 70s might have claimed Enoch Powell was a fascist, but that was just as divorced from reality as similar allegations about the BNP in 2009.
Naturally, this is an open-ended question. Perhaps in the future the BNP, or more likely some offshoot, will turn towards fascism, albeit a fascism draped in the lurid clothing of British national mythology (King Arthur, Boudica, Robin Hood, Winston Churchill, etc). Yes, regrettably, and contrary to a widespread belief, Marxists do not possess a crystal ball and thus cannot pronounce with exact accuracy on events yet to pass.
But what communists can do is assess things as they are at any particular concrete, historical juncture, and then map out the appropriate effective tactics and strategy on that basis. A process, needless to say, which has to be constantly reappraised and reassessed - on a day-by-day, sometimes even an hour-by-hour, basis. Clearly, if we were foolish enough to follow comrade Turley down the well-trod ‘BNP equals fascism’ road, then the only “operative political conclusion” - to use his own words - would be to blur the distinction between fascism and non-fascism. A major strategic and tactical blunder - one, of course, that so disfigured the 20th century, as even a cursory examination of Leon Trotsky’s profound writings on fascism/Nazism would reveal, and we hope will not blight the century we now find ourselves in.
Eddie Ford
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‘Common sense’
Comrade Bob Potter usefully reminds us that there was a “‘darker’ side” to the German Communist Party’s tactics against the Nazis (Letters, July 30). I can only agree - the process of Stalinisation that the KPD was subjected to ensured that it had not serious strategy for working class power.
But in the early 1920s the KPD was a different beast. In my initial article, I highlighted its various tactics not as a kind of template to be automatically copied in relation to the BNP (not only are we in 2009, not 1923, but the KPD lost!), but rather to show that it was not anathema for healthy elements of our movement to approach far-right or even fascist organisations armed with an array of tactical weapons (‘How not to stop the BNP’, July 23).
Somewhere along the line, however, it has become axiomatic on both the Stalinist and Trotskyist left that ‘Nazi’ organisations must never be opposed by openly confronting their politics in debate. But the likes of the Socialist Workers Party combine tactical inflexibility with a 2009 version of popular frontism - uniting the working class movement with the ‘democratic’ fraction of the bourgeoisie (whatever that is) in order to defeat the BNP ‘fascists’.
As for the modern-day Trotskyists, while they distance themselves from popular frontism and from Stalinist/SWP appeals to the state and bourgeois democracy, they are completely at one with the former over the ‘no platform’ ‘principle’.
Regardless of where exactly the left lost its way on this question, the point that needs to be hammered home is that the current strategy is simply not working. In re-articulating Marxist politics today it is necessary to carry out a forensic investigation of our movement’s history in order to correct past mistakes. We cannot simply rely on an inherited ‘common sense’ - which in many cases simply repeat those mistakes.
Ben Lewis
London
Sisyphus rules
Comrade David Walters gets Jack Conrad completely wrong (Letters, July 30). Jack is not arguing that there is an industrial-military complex which is evil, on the one hand, and a relatively benign civil society, on the other. Teflon might have migrated from rockets to frying pans, but spoons and plates have migrated to military messes. There is one integrated system.
Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” has turned into hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles. An intentioned outcome of that “small step for a man”. Markets are not free, but policed and controlled by military means, even if that means destruction on a catastrophic scale.
American state propaganda about the final frontier is hogwash. The real aim is to create a system of policing the Earth from near space in a manner that leaves the US hegemonic. Absolute military control is the name of the game. If we are really lucky, the systems might be so sophisticated that they may be able to kill us selectively, thereby avoiding catastrophic destruction. Enjoy.
Capitalism’s central problem is that it must drive forward or face collapse. It is a system permanently out of kilter. It constantly strives to replace people with machines and to overwhelm all other forms of production and dominate the earth. Profit is necessary, but it is not primary - control is primary. Capitalism is a labour of Sisyphus. Despite all the machines that have been invented, there are more workers than ever before.
Capitalism is technically capable of eliminating both unemployment and poverty - even in Afghanistan, which comrade Walters mentions in his letter. But unemployment and poverty are the means by which the exploitation of the workers is controlled. Hence there is actually more unemployment and extreme poverty in the world than ever before. The poor cannot really defend themselves against capitalism, but they resent the modern world and strike out against it.
Capitalism needs these people, so it cannot eliminate them nor integrate them, but must perpetually seek to exercise (ineffectual) punitive control. For capitalism there is still a light at the end of the tunnel. Military expenditure eats fictitious capital, drives technology, creates jobs and profits in the US and in its allies’ domains. Thus keeping the world economy afloat, but at enormous human cost and continual political instability.
So roll out more guns. Sisyphus rules OK.
Phil Kent
Haringey
Holy grail
I see Dave Craig’s never-ending search for the holy grail of a republican socialist party (or halfway house between reformism and revolution) has landed him in the No2EU lash-up on the grounds that its full title includes the words, ‘Yes to democracy’. His article, ‘BNP 2, Republic 0’, leaves rationality behind as early as the second sentence, when he describes the Iranian regime as “broadly” a “monarchical democracy” (Weekly Worker July 30).
Leave that aside, I expect that his hopes for whatever emerges from No2EU will be dashed on the rocks of reality. There was not a smidgen of internal democratic practice in the project and the ‘democracy’ they signed up for was the monarchical British constitution sans Europe. While I welcome the fact that Socialist Party in England and Wales leader Peter Taaffe has come out explicitly for the abolition of the monarchy, etc, he does not go far enough. No2EU was thought of as a project aimed at replacing the Labour Party with another, more leftwing, version, which will not betray us this time.
The project has little or no chance of success because the Labour Party proper already occupies that political space and despite its present unpopularity is vastly bigger and better connected than the likes of Taaffe and his allies in the RMT union and the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. But what is the point of aiming for a Labour Party mark two in any case? What is needed is a mass Marxist party.
Nothing that can be encapsulated in a single sentence better exemplifies the suction power of bourgeois attitudes latent in SPEW comrades than their refusal to say where they stand on the question of arming the working class. Perhaps secretly they do want to arm the working class or perhaps they believe that the current armed forces, police, prison and judicial authorities that are employed and rewarded by the state will turn in their entirety against that state and take the side of the people in a revolutionary situation.
Iran rather implies that they will not. Yet even with millions on the street chanting slogans in favour of arms, comrade Craig implies they need a (halfway house?) “republican party” in that country. Why not a Communist Party?
SPEW, and people like comrade Craig who claim to stand for republican democracy, must come out in support of the independent right of the working class to defend itself and not rely on the state. It is not a question of being a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ revolutionary, as comrade Craig suggests, but of trying to encourage a movement away from a kind of politics that must fail towards one that can work. That cannot be achieved through a cosy alliance based on fudged politics.
Voting Labour was an improvement on voting for an undemocratic, British chauvinist non-party, which offered nothing to a working class that hadn’t even heard of it and which, incidentally, was so sectarian that it banned the CPGB and the rest of the “ultra-left” from joining before it was even set up.
Arthur Lawrence
email
Star deniers?
Has the Morning Star become a home for fruitcake conspiracy theorists - like the odious ‘9/11 Truthers’, Holocaust deniers, etc? I ask because Nick Kollerstrom’s Terror on the tube enjoyed a very positive review on that organisation’s website - only to be hurriedly removed without any explanation. Try to read it and you now get the slightly cryptic message, “The requested module culture could not be found” (tinyurl.com/lcv4gp).
As reported on Dave Osler’s always reliable blog, Dave’s Part (www.davidosler.com), the Morning Star reviewer, Geoff Simons, almost gushingly told us that here is a “work that tears the official explanation for the July 7 tube and bus bombings to shreds”, and contains a “detailed analysis based on a wealth of information” - so much so that the “government story” is “completely demolished”. Blimey.
Who is Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom - former research fellow at University College London - and what is the book about? In order to tear apart the government’s “lies” about July 7, the book quotes the views of “US analyst” Webster Tarpley, who in 2005 declared: “Last week’s London explosions carry the characteristic features of state-sponsored, synthetic provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI5, MI6, the home office and the metropolitan special branch, who are favourable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East”.
Upon further investigation it turns out that this “US analyst” is an associate of a certain Lyndon LaRouche - an American, though certainly colourful, crackpot who used to be a member of the US Socialist Workers Party (where he was aligned to the Healyite Revolutionary Tendency faction) and has tried eight times to become the US president. Once as a US Labor Party candidate and seven times in the Democratic Party primaries. Our former Trotskyist became a firm supporter of the Reaganite Strategic Defence Initiative and promotes the colonisation of the moon and Mars.
LaRouche, amongst many things, believes - as comrade Osler puts it - that the “first world war stemmed from a British plot to transform the empire into a single world government” and that Barack Obama is “a secret front man for a far-right faction around Zbigniew Brzezinski”. He has been dogged for many years by allegations of anti-semitism and of links with all manner of neo-Nazi and ultra-right individuals and organisations.
In this vein, Kollerstrom extends his conspiracy theories about the July 7 tube bombings to September 11 2001, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul and Mumbai. All carried out, of course, by the respective governments on behalf of ‘the Zionists’ - or so Kollerstrom very strongly hints. Furthermore, in his paper, The Auschwitz ‘gas chamber’ illusion (just google it), the charming Dr Kollerstrom maintains that the “gas chambers operated for purposes of hygiene and disinfection, in order to save lives and not take them” - indeed, Zyklon-B “was vital in attempting to maintain hygiene”. And so on.
We also discover that Terror on the tube was published by Progressive Press, which promotes books and DVDs “exposing the crime clique that robs and rules our planet”. That is, it is a repository for just about every lunatic conspiracy theory you can think of, and many more besides (see www.waronfreedom.org).
Centrally, and most worryingly, how on earth did the Morning Star get itself into a situation where such an obviously crazy - and quite foul - piece of work could get such a positive airing on its website? Whatever happened to ‘quality control’ and editorial judgement?
Danny Hammill
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Excellent
I thought Jim Creegan’s ‘Wobbling to the right’ was an excellent article (July 30). One note, though: it’s PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program), not PIPP.
Billy O’Connor
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