Letters
Monotonic
Two of your correspondents, Steve Cooke and Steve Wallis, repeat the claim that the single transferable vote election system is ‘proportional’ (Letters, November 5).
This is a myth propagated by some bourgeois ideologues, and widely believed. It is easily refuted.
A necessary (albeit not sufficient) condition of proportionality is that if support for a given party increases then, other things being equal, the number of seats it wins cannot decrease. This is known in the technical literature as the ‘monotonicity’ condition.
Here is a simple example showing that STV violates this condition. Consider a constituency of 26 voters who need to elect two MPs. Suppose there are four candidates, standing for four parties, say A, B, C and D; and the voters indicate their preferences as follows:
6: A B C D
2: B A C D
4: B C A D
5: C A B D
9: D C A B
(Here the first row means that six voters prefer candidate A to candidate B, B to C and C to D. The other rows are to be interpreted similarly.)
According to the rules of STV, the quota needed for being elected outright is nine votes. This is because at most two candidates can get at least nine first-preference votes. So candidate D gets elected outright. Candidate C has the smallest number of first-preference votes, so she is eliminated and her five second-preference votes are added to candidate A, who now has 11 votes and gets elected. So here the winners are candidates D and A.
But suppose that the two voters listed in the second row change their minds and decide to prefer candidates A to B; and all else remains unchanged. Now we have:
8: A B C D
4: B C A D
5: C A B D
9: D C A B
Again candidate D is elected outright. But now it is candidate B who has the least number of first-preference votes, so he is eliminated and his four second-preference votes are added to candidate C, who now has nine votes and gets elected. So here the winners are candidates D and C.
Thus, an increase of support for candidate A (and no other change) has resulted in A losing instead of winning!
This is, of course, just a toy example and I have used small numbers for the sake of simplicity. But the same phenomenon can be illustrated with large, and more realistic, numbers.
It is true that STV tends to produce less disproportionate outcomes than the extremely undemocratic plurality (‘first past the post’) system. But this is not saying very much. And the approximate degree of proportionality it produces is quite erratic.
Comrade Wallis says: “Due to the advantages a genuine form of PR such as STV gives to both extremes, left and right, it looks very unlikely that the capitalist parties will introduce it ... I advocate STV more as a policy we should introduce after a socialist revolution ...”
Actually, STV is currently used in Ireland and several other capitalist countries. And depicting STV as the epitome of democracy, fit for a socialist society, is ill-founded.
Moshé Machover
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Confused CS
Despite promising a full mobilisation, only one member (not from Manchester) of Communist Students turned up for the anti-English Defence League mobilisation in Leeds on October 31.
This is surely caused by the political confusion wrought by Ben Lewis and James Turley on the question of ‘no platform’. To take just one example, in his article ‘How not to stop the BNP’ (July 23), Ben Lewis endorses the biggest mistake that the Bolsheviks ever made - debating the fascists in 1923 - typified by the infamous speech by Karl Radek to the executive committee of the Communist International (www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1923/06/schlageter.htm).
Trotsky was not present at that meeting, and Lenin was by now at death’s door. The meeting was politically dominated by Stalin, Zinoviev and Bukharin, who were already well advanced in opportunist degeneration, as Trotsky pointed out in Lessons of October. We might accuse Trotsky of failing to carry out Lenin’s instructions to wage political war on Stalin at that point, but he waited in expectation of Lenin’s recovery and then, after his death, he was reluctant to fight to split the Bolsheviks by revealing the contents of Lenin’s testament.
Comrade Lewis says: “As both Broué and Harman acknowledge in their accounts, these meetings (between Nazis and communists) proved too much for the Nazis, who discontinued them after August 1923, believing them to be a cause of lost members and waning influence.” It really is impermissible to endorse the political confusion of both Broué and Harman on the reason for the decline in the influence of the fascists. By August 1923 there was a rapidly developing revolutionary situation in Germany and this is what caused the decline in the number of fascist sympathisers.
And, as we all know, this revolutionary situation was lost because of the political confusion of the KPD leadership, Heinrich Brandler in particular. Making alliances with fascists instead of preparing the working class for revolution is most definitely the wrong orientation; it was opportunist, libertarian rubbish. And Ben endorses Ruth Fischer in his piece, who Lenin described, together with Arkadi Maslow, as “the worst sort of opportunists”.
Let us see what German communist leader Walter Held made of these events: “But the most hopeless floundering was in the ranks of the Communist Party. With its adventuristic soul it swam in the wake of the chauvinist Nazi propaganda; with its bureaucratic ‘ministerial’ soul, it adapted itself to the sterile, negatively limited anti-fascism of the social democracy ... Confusion reached its height when, in Moscow, Radek glorified the anti-semitic soldier, Schlageter. ‘Schlageter, the courageous soldier of the counterrevolution, deserves to be honoured by us soldiers of the revolution,’ declared Radek in an improvised speech at the extended plenum of the ECCI on the day after Schlageter was shot by the French troops of occupation. The speaker turned to the ‘German Workers Party’ (as the Nazis were then called) with the question: ‘Against whom do you want to fight - Entente capitalism or the Russian people? With whom do you want to unite - the Russian workers and peasants in our common struggle to throw off the burden of finance capital or with Entente capital to enslave the German and Russian people?’
“Through Radek’s words, the communists declared themselves ready to be in league with the Nazis: ‘We shall do everything so that men like Schlageter, who were ready to encounter death for a common cause, shall not be wanderers into nothingness, but travellers towards a better future for all of humanity’. At this conference only one delegate - the German Bohemian, Neurath - protested against this nationalist-communist mischief. Otherwise Radek’s speech aroused frantic applause. In Germany it was the basis of a series of fraternal actions between the communists and the Nazis. Communist firms published pamphlets in which communist and Nazi statements appeared alongside each other. This ideological disintegration made rapid progress.”
You can find the rest of the very important article, ‘Why the German revolution failed’, at www.marxists.org/archive/held-walter/1942/12/germrev.htm.
Gerry Downing
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Got it in one
I am currently researching Marxism as part of my philosophy course and I am struggling to understand the debate over internationalism versus the Stalinist concept of ‘socialism in one country’.
Whilst I agree that internationalism is preferable, given that a universal brotherhood of man is desirable, I cannot see why socialism in one country is doomed to failure, as the Trotskyists argue. Is it because socialism in one country cannot compete with rival capitalist countries, even when that country has resources as vast as Russia? Does this not tacitly admit that a capitalist economy is stronger than a socialist one?
Or is it more to do with the hostilities invoked by being a socialist country in a sea of capitalist ones? But why then can’t the socialist country defend itself? Again, this seems to point to a tacit admittance that the socialist economy is necessarily weaker.
I think this is an important debate because, whilst I can see socialists winning power in the odd country, I can’t see the revolution spreading unless that country is doing well, and therefore internationalism can never come to fruition. The Weekly Worker argues that the European Union should go socialist. But would this ‘socialism in several countries’ not carry the same problems as that faced by Soviet Russia?
Fern Rachels
Brighton
Political road
The recent decision by the Irish National Liberation Army to renounce armed struggle and encourage all its members and supporters to engage in politics is welcome. It is the end of one chapter in the history of republican socialism. But it should not be the end of republican socialism.
Abuse has been the stable form of political analysis for some republicans. ‘Sell-out’, ‘traitors’ and other forms of abuse have routinely been applied to any republicans that sought to develop their republicanism from the simple slogans of ‘Brits out’ or the ‘armed struggle’. Indeed there was a long period during the 70s and 80s when it was almost considered profane to question the tactic of armed struggle. References to 1916 heroism and the brave guerrilla fighters were enough to end debate.
So it has been a welcome development that after a period of intense debate and arguments the leadership and volunteers of the INLA have reached the decision they did. Perhaps it was always inevitable. The INLA had been plagued over the years with internal bickering, external physical attacks, infiltration from pro-British agents and sometimes apolitical leaders. When the membership took back control of the organisation from the Torney faction in the mid-90s a slow process of politicisation took place.
Recognising the changing political situation, the organisation in April1996 adopted the position of defence and retaliation and promoted the idea of a non-aggression pact to lessen sectarian tensions. The decision to call a ceasefire in August 1998 was another step in moving away from a military strategy. Now the 2009 decision is the culmination of a process that began back in that period 1994-95.
In the intervening years the Irish Republican Socialist Party has been almost rebuilt from scratch. It is now in as strong a position as it has ever been despite many teething problems. During all those years of rebuilding it kept its commitment to the centrality of the working class in the struggle and reaffirmed its Marxist orientation in all the ard fheis [conferences] since1997.
Indeed it is fair to say that the continued existence of the republican socialist movement is as a result of its commitment to a specific form of socialism and a specific form of republicanism. It rejected nationalism and pointed out the dangers of sectarianism. It placed itself firmly in the camp of internationalism, rejecting imperialism and committing itself to a socialist world.
But beware of the word ‘struggle’! Too many republicans think that struggle equates with the use of arms against the British. What kind of serious revolutionary restricts him/herself to only one form of struggle? The almost exclusive use of armed struggle by republicans from the 20s up to today resulted in almost total failure. Some republicans have been reduced to believing that the maintenance of armed struggle is a success in itself without regard to the goals that republican actually have.
The sum total success of the use of armed struggle by republicans has been the legitimisation of the 26-county state in the eyes of its inhabitants and the stabilisation and consolidation of the northern state under British hegemony. Some return for the generations of republicans killed, jailed and demonised over the past 90 years.
On the other hand, those who adopted an almost exclusively parliamentary road also failed. Fianna Fáil in the 20s, Clann Na Poblachta in the 50s, the Workers Party and Democratic Left in the 80s and 90s, and now Provisional Sinn Féin all succumbed to the lure of constitutional politics and forsook their revolutionary past, becoming integrate in to the ruling class and administering capitalist rule in Ireland.
Two major attempts to build a mass anti-imperialist front - in the 30s with the Republican Congress and in 1976-77 to build a ‘broad front’ - also ended in failure. The death of Seamus Costello, a founder of the IRSP who advocated the broad front strategy, stymied the approach, and subsequent attempts by the IRSP during the 1981 hunger strikes and in the recent past few years to build some republican left unity in action came to nothing.
These three approaches - armed struggle, parliamentarism and broad fronts - are not the only actions available to revolutionaries. Traditionally Marxist groups have worked within the trade unions, seeking to win advanced sections of workers to the ideas of socialism, supporting workers in defence of hard won rights and seeking to influence significant sections of the trade union bureaucracy to make a left turn and/or establish rank and file groups to mobilise the working class.
Others argue that, given the strict segregation that operates within the northern state, the best method is to operate at a community level, working within the sectarian parameters of the state, trying to reach across sectarian divides using community groups and ex-political prisoners’ organisations to build up contacts. This approach leaves one open to the charge of ‘gas and water socialism’. It also leaves one open to the charge of pandering to reactionary loyalism by giving credence to former loyalist combatants. Certainly if it means hiding one’s politics or aims, such a charge is justified.
But left republicans need to ask themselves, how do we reach out to the mass of workers with illusions either in British or Irish nationalism? One thing is for certain: it will not be easy or quick. Given the strong, entrenched hold that sectarian views have, it is not surprising that many seek short cuts or else give up the struggle altogether, but revolutionaries should, rather than see the difficulties, see the opportunities.
There can be no better time to win workers to the ideas of socialism in Ireland. The crisis within the world banking system has seen the governments pouring money into the banks to maintain the system, while at the same time exhorting workers to do the patriotic thing and accept savage cuts in wages and living conditions. North or south or in Britain, all workers are under attack, regardless of ethnic background, nationality, religion or colour.
In the south of Ireland the economic crisis means that it is the working class who are bearing the worst of the cuts and there is much scope for intervention by socialists. Fianna Fáil has its lowest support for years and the public front line service unions are in militant mood over proposed cuts in wages.
In the north it is imperative that efforts are now directed towards the defence of not only the public services but of the rights of all workers. It would be a bad mistake for the IRSP to shadow Provisional Sinn Féin by echoing the mantras of ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’.
It needs to be clearly stated that there is no such thing as equality under capitalism. Sloganising about equality in the current context of the north simply means the redistribution of resources away from the mainly Protestant population and towards the mainly Catholic population. Then it becomes a sectarian dogfight. Indeed that was precisely the intent of the British when they negotiated the Good Friday agreement. It has always been in Britain’s imperial interests to nurture and maintain sectarianism in Ireland.
It is inconceivable that the IRSP, particularly with the examples of Seamus Costello and Ta Power before them, could go down the path of reformist illusions. Certainly the IRSP should re-educate itself in the classic writings of Marxism and republicanism. It needs to organise, agitate and work with the broad working class movement. It should certainly consider fighting elections, should work within the trade union movement, with other republicans, Marxists, socialists, etc and work to build a mass party of the working class that encompasses all nationalities.
No doubt the usual macho talk will surface on the internet and in the pubs that the ‘Irps’ have lost their nerve. But the decision to stand down the INLA was not taken by ceasefire soldiers. It was taken by comrades whose republican involvement sometimes predated the establishment of the IRSP in 1974 and was the collective decision of many comrades who believed in the armed struggle, participated in that struggle and were shot and or jailed for their involvement in the struggle against British imperialism. It was absolutely the right decision.
GR
IRSP
