Letter: Wally Preston (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I have just come across on your website the (undated) obituary of Wally Preston [it was in the November 2000 issue – Eds]. I had not heard of Wally’s death, and was saddened to learn of it. I met him several times when he was a member of the International Socialists in the 1970s, and he once stayed the night at my home. He was a splendid speaker, a genuine working-class intellectual and a very likeable human being.

However, I must correct your obituarist on one point. He quotes my short history of the IS/SWP and deduces that the comrade who told an IS Conference that a document was so bad it must have been written by a sociologist was Wally. It was not. That speech was made by the late Terry Barrett, a London docker. Barrett was a man of great courage and principle (he publicly opposed the dockers’ march in support of Enoch Powell in 1968), but he was on occasion given to a certain demagogic anti-intellectualism of a sort that I think Wally would not have indulged in.

Ian Birchall, 

London, N9

Blogger's Note:

See the comment below for more background about Terry Barrett.

Letters: Timeless Leninism? (2015)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Timeless Leninism?

Dear Editors

I think a careful reading of my document and of my biography of Tony Cliff would respond adequately to all your points (‘Where Leadership Leads’, February Socialist Standard). Indeed your author seems to have been rather careless in checking his facts – What is to be Done? was published in 1902 not 1903; much more seriously, your author simply disregards the arguments developed not only by Cliff, but by Hal Draper, Pierre Broué, Lars T Lih and many others about the place of What Is to be Done? in Lenin’s work, and whether it can be considered as a timeless statement of ‘Leninism’. Likewise the IS did not adopt the slate system until 1975, which rather undermines the claim that it is a central tenet of Leninism.  As for ‘what we’ve been saying for over 100 years’, that may well be true, but with what results? It is easy enough to point to the limited achievements of the Leninist left, but since your own achievements are equally thin on the ground, a more modest tone might be called for.

Ian Birchall

Reply:

We are aware that there is a school of historical revisionists who try to argue that Lenin was merely a left-wing Social Democrat. This may well be how he appeared when he participated in discussions within the Second International, but inside Russia he never gave up the idea that the revolution there would have to be led by a vanguard party of full-time revolutionaries organised on the lines he had outlined in his 1902 pamphlet and which had shocked other revolutionaries at the time such as Rosa Luxemburg and even Trotsky.

That he still held this view to the end can be seen from his other notorious pamphlet, Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, that came out in 1920. In chapter II, headed ‘One of the Basic Prerequisites for the Success of the Bolsheviks’, he wrote repeatedly about ‘absolute centralisation’ and ‘iron discipline’ and attributed the Bolsheviks’ success to this. He still clearly thought in terms of a centralised and disciplined vanguard party ‘leading and attracting the backward masses.’ The chapter can be read on the internet here.

There is also the fact that, historically, all parties and groups descended from the Bolshevik Party under Lenin, Trotskyist as well as Stalinist, have been organised as vanguard parties along the lines of his 1902 pamphlet. Frankly, we cannot understand how anyone can seriously argue that Lenin did not advocate a centralised and highly disciplined party of full-time revolutionaries.–Editors.

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More on Syriza

Dear Editors

I agree with the article written on page 10 of February Socialist Standard about Syriza. But Syriza is not simply a coalition of various left and green, etc. There are also various splits from the socialist party (like the Labour in England) and more important inside Syriza the most solid ideologically group are  the one of the ex-eurocommunist party of Greece that gave also to Syriza the ideological guidelines in a eurocommunist way like the 70s. The thinktank of Syriza is called ‘Nikos Poulantzas’. If somebody is sect-maniac I can send you a list of the groups that consist Syriza!

Anyway I think the next thing to be analyzed is why Syriza collaborated with a populist party to rule the country, but this is strictly a Greek peculiarity…

Theodore Desponis, 

Greece

What Happened in France Last May (1969)

Book Reviews from the January 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Obsolete Communism: The Left-wing Alternative. by Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. (Andre Deutsch. 25s.)

France: The Struggle Goes On by Tony Cliff and Ian Birchall. (International Socialism Special. 2s. 6d.)

French Revolution 1968. by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville. (Penguin. 6s.)

Mai 1968: La Brèche. by Morin. Lefort and Coudray. (Fayard, 10 Frs.)

La Révolution Trahie de 1968. by Andre Barjonet. (John Dldier.)

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is just an ordinary anarcho-syndicalist. In their hastily-written book he and his brother advance the old theory that the direct action of a militant minority can expose the repressive nature of the state and spark off a general strike that will lead to the overthrow of capitalism. They explain the failure of last year’s French strike by the fact that in the last week of May when the government was at its weakest the crowds after trying to burn the Paris stock exchange did not go on to take the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, but were dissuaded from doing so by, among others, trotskyist leaders. If they had done this, the claim is, and the workers in the factories had restarted production under their own control the revolution would have succeeded.

This is a simple, and not very plausible, explanation. The real reason capitalism was not overthrown was because the vast majority of French workers were not in favour of this. True, they were greatly discontented with rising prices, lagging wages, unemployment, long hours, harsh discipline, but they were not socialist. So, whatever the outcome of the strike it could not have been the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Socialism. There never was any revolutionary situation and the attempt by anarchists and trotskyists to turn the general strike to defend living standards and working conditions into an insurrection against capitalism was doomed to fail. Its main result has been to strengthen the hand of the Gaullist government.

This book (whose French title Leftism: A Remedy for the Senile Disorder of Communism is a clever play on a title of one of Lenin’s pamphlets, obviously considered too subtle by the publishers) is in four parts. The first has some sound stuff on universities as capitalist institutions geared to turning out a managerial élite to run capitalist industry. The second is the usual anarchist attack on the state and praise for direct action and the general strike. The third is an exposé of the dirty, anti-working class role of the French Communist Party (PCF) from the thirties onward. The fourth—obviously aimed at those who fought side-by-side with Cohn-Bendit on the barricades—is an attack on the Bolshevik theory of the vanguard party. Cohn-Bendit and his brother show quite clearly how Lenin and Trotsky, by means of a policy of state capitalism, began the repression of the Russian workers which Stalin continued so brutally.

This should be essential reading for trotskyists like Cliff and Birchall who still defend the Bolshevik coup and minority dictatorship and call for a centralised and disciplined party. Their pamphlet is not really worth reading as all the facts, and a few common sense observations, can be had by reading the much better-written Penguin Special, despite its misleading title.

Morin, Lefort and Coudray are also basically syndicalists but of a less orthodox kind. Capitalism, they say, has changed into “techno-bureaucratic society” (Morin), “bourgeois-bureaucratic society" (Lefort) or “bureaucratic capitalism” (Coudray) in which the conflict is no longer between the property-owners and the propertyless but between the controllers and the controlled. The main features of this society are bureaucracy and hierarchy: those at the top know best so those at the bottom must obey. The revolutionary students, they say, in challenging this set-up in the universities have pointed the way for the rest of society. Because of the key-role played by the technical and professional groups today their discontent has revolutionary potential. They and their trainees, the students, not the industrial workers, are the force for Socialism.

Since it is an old anarchist myth that the class struggle has always been between rulers and ruled rather than producers and non-producers, it is not surprising to find the three fall back on the syndicalist tradition. Morin is clearly carried away by the whole affair. He talks enthusiastically about the students’ actions as a return to “original communism, purged of all Stalinism, marxism-leninism and bolshevism” which will lead to what Coudray calls the grève gestionnaire (a significant change from the old syndicalist grève expropriate, reflecting the shift of emphasis from ownership to control).

Barjonet’s pamphlet is interesting in that for over twenty years he was head of the Communist trade union centre’s (CGT) research department, a post he resigned in May in protest against the cowardly attitude of the CGT and PCF. He felt (mistakenly, we might add) that a potential socialist revolution was betrayed by the failure of the PCF to act even to overthrow the Gaullist regime. let alone capitalism.

Barjonet traces the defects of the PCF back to Lenin. Leninist practice has always been to try to lead the workers by placing attractive slogans before them. But this merely allots them a passive role and inevitably leads to the Leninist vanguard thinking that it always knows best. “Marxism-Leninism”, says Barjonet and we couldn’t agree more, “has been an historic misfortune for the international working class". He calls for a return to Marx who clearly understood that the workers themselves, not any leaders, must play the creative role in the socialist revolution and that working class organisations must be thoroughly democratic.

The three books from France show an encouraging rejection of and contempt for Bolshevism. We can only hope that this is the beginning of its demise in western Europe where it has had such a pernicious effect on working class thinking. If the May events have helped this they will have done something.

Adam Buick

A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin (2005)

Book Review from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin. Ian Birchall. Bookmarks. £2.

This is an odd, 58-page top-pocket-size pamphlet. Odd because it is written in very simple language and seems to be aimed at schoolkids who might be influenced by anarchist ideas.

Thus, Birchall tells us, “Lenin’s goal was the same as the anarchists’, but he recognised that the path it would be complex”. Yes indeed, by means of the dictatorship of a vanguard party which would last for years and which would, supposedly, in time give up its power and privilege and abolish the state.

Birchall quotes from ex-anarchists who came over to the Bolsheviks such as Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge and tells us that Lenin “spent hours discussing with anarchists such as Emma Goodman from the US and Makhno from Ukraine” and argued that “the syndicalist idea of an ‘organised minority’ of the most militant workers and the Bolshevik idea of the party were the same thing”.

This may have worked in the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian revolution to temporarily win over a number of anarchists and syndicalists, but it is hard to see it working today to get any budding anarchists to join the SWP.

Adam Buick

Obituary: Wally Preston (2000)

Obituary from the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to announce the death of Wally Preston. Wally first came across the Party in the 1930s joining Manchester Branch after the war before drifting out at the end of 1950s and rejoining in 1979. He was a tool-maker by trade and a stalwart of the engineering union over decades. It was his union activity that led him to become involved in the early 1970s in the International Socialism group, the organisation which was eventually to become the SWP. For a period Wally was a member of its National Committee and was the editor of Advance, the IS paper for rank-and-file workers in the power industry.

It would be fair to say that Wally was something of a “workerist” and one of his typical contributions was captured by Ian Birchall in his history of IS:

“At one IS conference an industrial worker denounced a document being circulated as 'so bad it must have been written by a sociologist'. He was cheered to the echo by the audience, a fair percentage of whom were sociology students.” 'The History of the International Socialists' by Ian Birchall in International Socialism 77 (first series).

The irony of this would certainly not have been lost on Wally. Eventually the 'rank and file' trade union militants with which Wally was associated left IS dismayed at its mixture of opportunistic student radicalism and vanguard politics. It was after a few years in the wilderness that he finally returned to the ranks of the SPGB in his native Manchester.

Andy Pitts writes:

I first met Wally some 13 years ago as a new member joining the Eccles Branch. I was immediately taken with his enthusiasm and struck by his passionate pursuit of the socialist cause. It was a time of intense branch activity and it was Wally who encouraged the members to throw themselves into the action and at times we were organising and addressing meetings not only in Eccles but also (with the help of the old Merseyside branch) in Warrington for a good period of time too.

We travelled all round the Greater Manchester area and beyond organising meetings, postering, selling literature on the streets, attending our opponents' meetings, anywhere we could find an audience to put the case for socialism. Wally would think nothing of nipping up to Barrow or down to London in the evening to address or attend a meeting. Even at that time Wally was considerably older than the rest of us, but he was never one to sit back, and let others do the work. He involved himself energetically in all publicity work, travelling countless miles on public transport with his wife, Blanche, with his paste bucket and bundles of posters. Wally was a knowledgeable man, self-educated with a prodigious ability to recall facts to bamboozle the opposition. If things weren't proceeding to plan you could always rely on him to set things right and eloquently explain the socialist position on whatever question was on the table.

Wally was also, to his credit, one of the founding members of South-East Manchester Branch, yet another area in which he used his talent and energy. Wally was committed to bringing the case to as wide an audience as he possibly could and was involved in a number of election campaigns using all his passion, experience and boundless energy to try to advance the socialist position. He was a walking encyclopaedia when it came to things historical with a particular area of speciality in things to do with Manchester. His tours on Marx in Manchester were an education. I for one am indebted for the enormous amount of information he imparted and felt the Party was, as he said, "the university of the working class".

Wally lived life to the full, not one to compromise his deeply-held principles. He had not only a life-long interest in politics, and in Marxist politics especially, but he was a keen exponent of jazz music. It was difficult to go anywhere with him without meeting somebody who knew him.

Wally has no need for an epitaph as the actions of his life in encouraging the working class to see through the mist of lies that obscure the truth say all that needs to be said.

New Interventions (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Interventions, Vol 8 , No 2, Winter 1997-98, PO Box 485 Coventry, CV5 6ZP. £2.

This issue of a Trotskyoid journal is devoted to a reappraisal of Bolshevism on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. But, instead of the expected praise of the Bolsheviks and a call for the 1917 experience to be repeated in this country, most of the contributors expressed doubts about whether the Bolsheviks did the right thing in 1917 and the years that followed.

Veteran Trotskyist Harry Ratner writes that Russia remained a genuine soviet regime (a workers' democracy) for only "a few weeks" after November 1917 (he says October 1917--Trotskyists still use the old Julian calendar). After that, the Bolsheviks established their own dictatorship. He wonders if it might not have been better if some sort of broad front democratic government had been allowed to emerge from the elections to the Constituent Assembly, and asks:

"So were Kautsky and the Mensheviks right to oppose the October Revolution from the start, as an attempt prematurely to go beyond the 'bourgeois' stage of the Russian revolution? Were they right to declare a socialist working-class revolution in a backward Russia premature and doomed to failure because the conditions for socialism were not ripe-both as regards the economic base and the social and cultural level of the working class? On the face of it, subsequent history would seem to justify them".

His reply is even more surprising:

"All one can say is that the 'workers' state' that was born in October 1917 was premature and infected from infancy. Unfortunately, as it degenerated, it infected the working-class movement internationally, and proved an obstacle on the road to socialism. My old comrade, the late Alex Acheson, who joined the movement in the 1930s and remained a committed Trotskyist till his death last year, once told me: 'It might have been better if the October Revolution had never occurred'".

Another contributor, Hillel Ticktin, editor of Critique, tackles the question "What if the Left Opposition had Taken Power?". After beginning with the preposterous statement that "the Russian Revolution is possibly the most important event so far in human history", his conclusion is that they too would have established a dictatorship that would have "had nothing to do with socialism" but would not have been as bad as Stalin's. He asks himself the same questions as Harry Ratner: "Do we wait until we have a revolution that is totally democratic?", "Are those who argue that in 1917 the means of production were not yet sufficiently developed then correct?". His answer is not very clear, especially not to the first one.

Al Richardson, editor of Revolutionary History, says that even "workers' state" is "a term that does not appear in Marx at all, to my knowledge". Only Ian Birchall of the SWP claims the mantle of true Bolshevism. It is his party that seems to him to "come nearest to being a legitimate successor to the essential spirit of Bolshevism". He's right. That's why they should be opposed.

Two other articles, one by a Socialist Party member on "Why the Russian Revolution Wasn't a Proletarian Revolution", the other by Alastair Mitchell on "1917 and All That", have no time at all for Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks.

The same issue also contains a lengthy reply by another Socialist Party member to an ignorant criticism of the Socialist Party in the previous issue by Ted Crawford who supplies an equally ignorant (in all senses of the word) reply.

Of course it wasn't just Kautsky, Martov and the Mensheviks who warned that conditions in Russia in 1917 weren't ripe for a socialist revolution there. We did too. In fact anyone who had read and understood Marx knew this. We know people don't like being told "we told you so". So we shall resist the temptation.

Adam Buick

Where Leadership Leads (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well-known for its stunts, street stalls and student activism, the SWP suffered a setback a couple of years ago which led to an exodus of members. One of them was Ian Birchall, the biographer of the group's founder Tony Cliff and himself a one-time member of the party's leadership. He had been a member of the SWP and its predecessor, the International Socialism group, for over 50 years. Last December he offered some views on his blog as to what went wrong (http://grimanddim.org/political-writings/2014-so-sad/)

When it was formed in the 1950s as a Trotskyist group which recognised that the so-called USSR was state capitalist (as we'd known all along) it was organised on the same lines as many other left-wing groups in this country. Its members were in the Labour Party and portrayed themselves as left-wing Labourites. Then in the 1960s things began to change, they moved out of the Labour Party and in 1968 Cliff decided that it was time to re-organise the group on stricter Leninist lines.

What prompted this was the general strike in France earlier that year. Typically, as a good Trotskyist, Cliff attributed its failure to result in a socialist revolution to the absence of a revolutionary party to lead the striking workers (not that socialist revolution was the real aim of the strike though it was in fact a success from a trade unionist point of view). He concluded that what 'revolutionaries' should do in the light of this was to openly organise themselves along the same lines as Lenin's Bolshevik party which, according to him and Trotskyist legend, had led to a successful socialist revolution (even if in his view it later degenerated into state capitalism).

Lenin had set out his view on how a revolutionary party should be organised in his notorious 1903 pamphlet What is to be Done? In it he proposed a party of full-time professional revolutionaries which should seek to lead the workers and peasants by formulating populist slogans reflecting the level of understanding that 'the masses' were considered capable of reaching.

This might have made some sense as a strategy for overthrowing a backward, autocratic regime like Tsarism. As it happened, the Tsarist regime collapsed of its own accord under the pressures of the First World War but Lenin's organisational form did help the Bolsheviks seize political control once Tsarism had collapsed. This success led Lenin to proclaim that this was the way revolutionaries should organise too in developed capitalist countries, even those where political democracy existed.

So, in 1968 the members of IS changed the name of their paper from Labour Worker to Socialist Worker and, more importantly, abandoned its previous organisational structure under which policy was decided by a conference of branch delegates voting on motions proposed by branches and where the members of the executive committee were elected as individuals. This was all swept aside and the 'slate' system that the Bolshevik party had used was adopted and which had also been inherited by the CPSU in Russia (yes, Leninism did lead to Stalinism too).

Under this system the 'leadership' (politburo, central committee or whatever it is called) is elected en bloc at the party's conference. Delegates don't vote for individual candidates, but for a list, or slate, containing as many names as there are vacancies. In theory there can be more than one list but in practice there never is or has been. In the SWP (as in the USSR), there was just one – proposed by the outgoing leadership. Rather than trying to put forward a rival list, the leadership's opponents preferred to leave and form another group organised on the same lines (one explanation for the proliferation of Trotskyist groups).

It can easily be seen that this is a recipe for the emergence of a self-perpetuating leadership. Which is precisely what happened, as Birchall noted:

'recent events have shown the limitations of the slate system. It has become a means whereby the CC can indefinitely propose itself for re-election, co-opting approved individuals as it goes.'

There was another consequence in the SWP too:

'Moreover, a career path has now clearly emerged – comrades, generally former students, become full-timers, and if they are successful, they rise in the apparatus and become CC members. Thus we get a CC almost entirely composed of people who have spent most of their political life as full-timers and have very limited experience of work or trade unionism.'

The slate system was also applied to elect the branch delegates to conference:

'Back in the eighties, when strong branch committees existed, the branch committee would nominate a slate of conference delegates. While it was obviously possible for members to nominate an alternative slate, this was frowned on, and in practice was relatively rare. I recall a chairperson telling us the agenda for a branch meeting and saying “and then the conference delegates will be announced”. In practice he was right – this was what usually happened.'

So the SWP ended up a top-down organisation run by a self-perpetuating clique.

Perhaps surprisingly, Birchall does not draw the conclusion that this is where the slate system, a central tenet of the Leninist vanguard party concept, was bound to lead. He still thinks in terms of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries organised on Leninist lines. His beef is not with the theory but with the way it was applied in the SWP – bureaucratically rather than democratically. But for him 'democracy' is not a decision-making procedure but merely a means of providing information to the leadership so that it can formulate the best policy to pursue and the best slogans to put before workers for them to follow:

'... a revolutionary leadership needs to know what is going on in the working class. It cannot do this by reading the Financial Times, it has to listen to comrades who have roots in different sections of the class and who can report on what is happening on the ground. As Cliff argued: “… they have to learn from their fellow workers as much as – or more than – they have to teach. To repeat, the job is to lead, and to lead you have to thoroughly understand those you are leading.”'

This is not democracy in any meaningful sense. It's still saying that the wage and salary working class is incapable of freeing itself on its own but needs to be led by a self-appointed vanguard. It is still rejecting the view that socialism, as a fully democratic society, can only be established democratically, both in the sense of being what a majority want and in the sense of employing democratic methods.

To establish socialism the wage and salary working class does need to organise itself to win political control, i.e. as a political party, but in a democratic party, not to follow a vanguard party or any other would-be leaders.

There is, however, one thing that Birchall seems to have learnt after more than 50 years as a Trotskyist/Leninist:

'The important thing at present is the battle of ideas; as William Morris put it, “it should be our special aim to make Socialists”.'

This is a quote from the Statement of Principles of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, drawn up in 1890. It's what we've been saying for over 100 years.

Adam Buick