Letters: Two Strikes (2004)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two Strikes

Dear Editors

Thanks very much for the review of my book Off the Rails in your February issue which is fine and not in the slightest bit offensive.

There are however two points I would make.

(1) I am surprised that the author concludes that the wider aspects of social partnership are not discussed in the book. In fact the entire last chapter deals with this issue, its effects and the reasons for it. It also broadens the debate considerably to consider factors in the U.K. trade unions, albeit in an admittedly minimalist way.

(2) On the wider point of my “socialism” I think the author misses the point. The point about my views on Irish unions is that they were not indoctrinated but gained by my own personal experiences. Tongue in cheek . . . I learned to hate Fianna Fail by experience not because I thought I must. I have learned from bitter experience how society is organised to the detriment of workers and do think that some sort of social “revolution” is necessary. I started one in my own small employment in my own small country. I think it is every bit as relevant a tactic to start small and work up as to go for broke from the outset, a tactic that in Ireland has almost led to the death of real socialism.

Just for the record also let me record that I have always been available to help workers in every section of their employment, Irish Rail or elsewhere, regardless of grade or occupation.

Finally however I do appreciate the review and am very happy with it on balance.

Brendan Ogle

(by e-mail)

Reply:

The first point concerns a minor issue; the background social factors are indeed briefly discussed in the last chapter but the preponderance of the book specifically concentrates on the dispute in question. This of course is the nature of the book.

The second point highlights a key issue. You state that you encountered the antagonistic class nature of society through personal experience; this is very much in accord with our viewpoint. However it is your response to this with which we would challenge.

You advance the superficially attractive idea that a good tactic is “to start small”; what socialists would call the reformist approach. However, even your own experience as described in the book shows that such reformist activity leads nowhere and can cause more disillusion. The socialist opinion is that real meaningful change to the position of workers in society can only come about by agitation for a complete transformation of how society is organized rather than by modest adjustments. Of course it is true that these minor improvements may bring important benefits to individual workers but fundamentally they don’t change anything. These reforms can be easily revoked (and often are) in a direct or indirect fashion. That’s not to say of course that we are opposed to trade union activity; it’s an essential part of the struggle of workers within capitalism but it will never go beyond being such a struggle

Editorial Committee

Miners’ Strike

Dear Editors

I thought that your piece on the miners’ strike (March Socialist Standard), was as masterly as it was concise.

I can recall that at that time I was 20, and naive enough to unquestionably accept my dad’s New Communist Party stance: It was us versus them; Scargill was right, and Thatcher was wrong; Let’s break this government, and return Labour to power. I told you I was naive!

It took almost another decade before my new father in law put me straight. Like you, he explained that Scargill was as bad for the NUM as the government were; that the Police, and the army, were there to maintain the status quo; and whatever party was running capitalism would have resorted to this same course of action. The scales fell from my eyes.

Now I am twice the age I was then, and conscious of real socialism. I realise that simply voting for someone else to run the capitalist economy isn’t ever going to achieve anything. Instead of watching a change of puppets, we ought to aspire to be the puppeteers

John Stanley, 

St Helens

Moscow's orphans (1998)

Book Review from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The British Communist Movement and Moscow’, by Mike Mosbacher. Libertarian Alliance, 1997.

Have you ever wondered what became of the Communist Party after the collapse of state capitalism in Russia and East Europe? This short pamphlet will tell you.

The official Communist Party – or Communist Party of Great Britain, to give its full name, by which it was only known on formal occasions and in an international context – in effect dissolved itself in 1991 when it changed its name to Democratic Left and became a trendy left green-feminist-gay pressure group. Its previous policies, however, were kept alive by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which broke away in 1988 and which still publishes the Morning Star. In Scotland another group of ex-CPers set up the Communist Party of Scotland in 1992. An earlier breakaway in 1977, the New Communist Party, still exists but has become, according to Mosbacher. little more than a group denying the atrocities that occurred under Stalin in the same irrational way as Nazis deny those that occurred under Hitler.

Immediately after the CPGB changed its name to Democratic Left in December 1991 this name was taken up by a group which had no historical, political or, for that matter, legal right to do so. The organisation that goes under this name, and publishes the Weekly Worker, is in fact a super-Leninist sect, apparently originating as a splinter from the Turkish Communist Party, which employs the same unscrupulous tactics of infiltrating other organisations (at the moment Scargill’s SLP) as the Trotskyists; indeed, according to Mosbacher, it does have Trotskyist members.

Mosbacher, surprisingly perhaps for a supporter of the mad free market ideas of the Libertarian Alliance, has produced a useful and well-informed little pamphlet. He gets our position right too when he states:

  “The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the view that the Soviet Union never was socialist in the first place. This has been its position since 1917. In a way this party goes further than any other on the revolutionary left in criticising the Soviet Union, in that it views Leninist principles and modes of organisation as non-socialist, indeed anti-socialist”.

Adam Buick 

Letters: Why Socialism Must Be World Wide (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why Socialism Must Be World Wide

Dear Editors,

I have read the articles in the November Socialist Standard setting out the basic socialist philosophy with much interest and benefit.

In its articles on Russia the Socialist Standard pointed out, in 1934, that socialism “is impossible in one country alone, owing to international economic interdependence”.

This fact still applies, so how would a socialist Britain, having abolished money, exchange goods with a predominantly capitalist world?

Bryan Fair, 

Dorchester, Dorset

Reply:

A “socialist Britain” is an impossibility for the same reason that a “socialist Russia” was in 1934: capitalism is a world system into which all countries are locked and from which none can escape on its own.

Various countries, beginning with Russia but also others like Cuba and Nicaragua, have tried to escape from the laws of the world market economy but only at the price of establishing a state capitalism which in the end has had to take into account world market pressures anyway.

In fact it could be said that an isolated “capitalist Britain” is just as impossible as an isolated “socialist Britain”. Ever since capitalism first began to develop about 500 years ago it has involved multi-lateral trade between different countries so making them mutually interdependent; in fact one definition of capitalism is that it is the world market, the world trading system.

As capitalism has developed countries have become more and more interdependent. International trade on which all parts of the world now depend for the daily lives of their inhabitants (just think what you had for breakfast) reflects the underlying fact that production itself involves working on materials that have in part come from different parts of the world.

At one time the typical pattern was that raw materials would come from one part, be worked up into a finished product in another, and then sold there or in some other part. Nowadays, not just raw materials but also parts and semi-finished products are exported and imported. The best known example is perhaps the “world car”, as most cars now are, whose various components are produced in a number of different countries and which is only assembled in one particular country.

So “interdependence” is the key fact of economic life today. Because capitalism is a world system so must be socialism, the system which will replace it. In fact, socialism recognises that all parts of the world are interdependent today and seeks to bring social and institutional arrangements into line with this underlying productive fact by establishing a worldwide democratic community with, besides local and regional (“national” in today’s parlance) administrations, a world administration. Frontiers become obsolete, as does adherence to a particular nation-state. We all become citizens of a united world, Earth-people not “British” or “American” or “Russian” or “South African” or whatever.

Trade, as the buying and selling of goods, ceases to exist but not of course the transfer of goods from one part of the world to another. This will still take place, even if the people of socialist society might decide to produce everyday items of individual consumption more locally than at present. This won’t be trade because it won’t be an exchange of equivalents measured in monetary terms. It will just be the transfer of materials and products from one part of the world to other parts where they are needed, without anything needing to be transferred “in exchange”

Editors.

A Stalinist Writes

Dear Editors,

I saw your review of the book Children of the Revolution; Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain and read it with interest. I must now buy the book, although I anticipate being enraged.

Being born in 1940 I well recall my childhood and teenage years as the son of Communist parents. Wonderful, loving Stalinist parents. Stalinists they must have been because they refused to go along with the demonisation of Joe.

I was brought up on the Daily Worker and books were always plentiful. I could go my own way, I was just one of the fortunate few with access to both sides. After a brief mid-teen crisis when I wanted to be the “gum-chewing good guy” and not a “gook” or an automaton under the control of “State Capitalism” I became a Communist.

Like your reviewer I too joined first the YCL and later the CP. However, I never quit. I went instead from believing that Stalin was of his time to now knowing that Stalin was right. He remains right to this day.

I remember telling my Dad that I wanted to go to Sunday School with some of the kids. This Stalinist said “go ahead”. I went once, never again. I remember too, being on a train with him in 1956 when a man came in the carriage asking for cash and help as he was a poor Hungarian on the run from the Russian hordes. My Dad put his glasses in his top pocket and told him “there are two ways to leave this carriage, by the window or the door, take your pick”. Predictably, this fighter against Red tyranny scurried through the door.

Because, comrades, sometimes the tanks have to be sent in and if the Hungarian counter-revolution had succeeded or the Czech one in 1967 [sic], the chaos that is now Eastern Europe would have occurred sooner with other generations suffering what is being suffered now thanks to revisionists, counter-revolutionists, traitors, the weak, corrupt and the liberal.

And who is counting the dead now, as they pile up all over Eastern Europe. But it’s OK, Wall Street and the CIA, the controlled media play it down, because after all, no-one’s nationalising anything without compensation. Nothing to worry about. Business as usual.

And when the cattle cars are filled again it will be that much harder to defeat the enemy next time without Joe and his Red Army.

Paul Barrett, 

Penarth, Mid Glam

Reply:

We have no reason to believe this letter is a spoof. It confirms the view about the “New Communist Party” expressed in the pamphlet by Mike Mosbacher reviewed on our books page and explains why they are known as the “Tankies”. Such people have done the cause of genuine socialism no end of harm by associating it with the vicious one-party state-capitalist dictatorship that existed in Russia under Stalin and where people were also transported in cattle cars to slave-labour camps where they died in their millions.

Editors.

British Left in Disarray (1990)

From the February 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now that Leninism is stewing in its own ideological juice, and the vanguard parties which bullied workers in the name of "the proletarian dictatorship" are being hissed off the world stage by the workers who detest them, the British Leninists must decide what to do. Apart from a diminishing number of left-wingers within the pro-market Labour Party who have never embraced the Leninist dogma, the vast majority of those on the British Left subscribe to the political ideology of Leninism. They may call themselves Marxist-Leninists, but in practice they stand in the tradition of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, and not Marx whose ideas Lenin distorted.

As Leninists they believe that the workers cannot understand the case for socialism, but must be led to revolution by politically-conscious cadres. The model for such a revolution is the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 in which a minority party claimed to establish a new social order on behalf of the non-socialist masses. Leninists preach the need for a vanguard party to lead the workers. Such a party must be organised on the basis of the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism" according to which dissent from the decisions of the leadership is an act of betrayal not to be tolerated. The Leninists' contempt for our ability as workers to emancipate ourselves from capitalism is matched by their opportunist efforts to be wherever the workers are in struggle, constantly aiming to lead such struggles. The Leninists are Generals looking for an army.

In Britain the Generals have always looked rather pathetic and the workers have shown a wise unwillingness to join the Leninist army. After the Bolshevik revolution most of the British Left went over to the side of Bolshevism. They were overwhelmed by the romanticism of the historically absurd claim of a small, secretive party in backward Russia to have established socialism by force of arms. Dazed by the Bolshevik daydream, the parties of the Left swallowed Lenin’s writings as if they were the revolutionary gospel, and formed the Communist Party of Great Britain.

From the outset the CP had as its purpose to repeat in Britain what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. Without Leninism as a dogma and "Socialist Russia" as a model, the CP had no reason to exist. As Russian state capitalism became more obviously anti-socialist in its nature, so the CP had to twist and distort more and more in order to justify itself. The CPGB of the 1930s was a party committed to the propagation of lies. Purges? But there are no purges, they said. A dictatorship ruled over by the monster Stalin? But Russia is a workers' dictatorship and Comrade Stalin is the greatest Marxist alive, they solemnly declared. Wage slavery? No, no, the Russian workers are free from capitalist exploitation. Most of them believed that what they were saying was true: some of the more cynical leaders knew they were lying, but “tactics, comrades, tactics!” They were good Leninists, and if lies were required to make workers follow them, then why let mere “bourgeois honesty” stand in the way? After 1945. as the Russian Empire expanded to take in millions of new East European subjects, the British Leninists praised the wonderful lifestyles of the new prisoners of Leninism.

Sixes and Sevens

With the collapse of East European Leninism, what is the British Left to do? It has three basic options. Firstly, it can pretend that nothing has happened and go on supporting the glorious socialist paradise of Russia, even though the rulers of Russia now admit that the paradise stinks of its own failure. Secondly, the Leninists can support reform in Eastern Europe, pretending that this is what had been necessary all along. It can enter into a love affair with perestroika, even though the current reforms embody everything that the Leninists have traditionally regarded as counter-revolution. Thirdly, the Leninist Left can hang up its boots and retire. After all, the Hungarian Communist Party has dissolved itself, and other East European CPs are due to do likewise. The Australian Communist Party, which had 20,000 members in its heydey of the 1940s, has voted by a three to one margin to close down, and in Italy the PCI (the largest in West Europe) is to change its name. The Dutch CP has joined a faction of the Greens.

In Britain there have been moves in all of these directions. The membership of the CPGB was 20,000 in 1980: it is now under 7.000—and those are just book numbers. In 1977 the CPGB split: those who left formed the New Communist Party, committed to uncritical support for the Leninist states, while those remaining began to criticise certain aspects of the Russian Empire, still insisting that it was socialist. These critics—the so-called Eurocommunists—were still committed to the basic Leninist dogma: amongst their leading thinkers was Monty Johnstone who spoke in a debate against the Socialist Party, arguing that Lenin was a good Marxist. The Eurocommunists were used by a new group within the CP, based around the party's “theoretical journal", Marxism Today and its editor-cum-guru, Martin Jacques, who wanted to advocate the policies of an important role for the market under "socialism”, electoral pacts with all anti-Thatcher forces and the rejection of any kind of class analysis. It is an irony of CP history that ten years ago Johnstone and those like him were the radical heretics within the CP, fighting against its Stalinist past: now they are the mainstream Leninists, fighting against the total abandonment of anything resembling Leninism by the new Jacques leadership.

In 1988 the CP split again: the Marxism Today loyalists retained control of the CPGB. while some of the old Leninists who could not tolerate the complete rejection of ancient doctrines formed the 1500-strong Communist Party of Britain. So, there are at least three CPs in Britain today: the Jacques-dominated CPGB. the more conventionally Leninist CPB and the incorrigibly Stalinist NCP. At its November 1989 Congress the CPGB did not vote on a motion to wind up the party—although there are plans for a referendum to close it down and form a so-called Socialist Forum which would not be a party and which anyone, including members of other parties such as the Greens, could join. It seems likely that this is what will happen eventually (so the ‘Premature Obituary which the Socialist Standard published last year was not all that premature after all). In the meantime the CPGB has voted to follow the Jacques line of celebrating the downfall of East European "Communism" (as he calls it) and of abandoning Leninist dogma for support for what they call a socialist market economy.

The future of the 200-strong New Communist Party looks very bleak. Its funding came from the traditionally Stalinist Czech Party, which is now fighting for its political life (a fight it will surely lose) and is unlikely to pay for the NCP's weekly newspaper. So. the last true advocate of unadulterated Stalinism awaits burial. The Communist Party of Britain will either go the same way or will remain a sect in which old Leninists can comfort themselves in seclusion from the rest of the world, endlessly repeating worn-out Leninist cliches to each other in public meetings which the public will regard as a club for those whose time has passed. One thing is for sure: nobody will be persuaded to join political parties which exist to support conceptions of socialism which history has shown to be detested by the workers who were forced to put up with them. A few Leninists will turn their attention to the fantasies of "socialism" in China (until that dam bursts, as it is bound to) or Cuba or Albania (for as long as that lasts). In general, the myth that socialism/communism now exists somewhere is virtually dead.

Left in a Mess

Writing in Marxism Today (a journal which must soon decide to change its name, for it is no longer Marxist even on its own terms). Martin Jacques has stated that the tradition of the Bolshevik revolution, in which Russia stood as a socialist model against the rest of the capitalist world, is no longer relevant:

That era is at an end. From now on. with gathering pace, there will be an interpenetration of the two systems. The Soviet Union, over time, will acquire markets, international firms will operate there. Soviet tourists will be a common sight in London The international communist movement is now surely at an end. (January 1990).

What Jacques means is that the old division between state and private capitalism is ending. In an Open Letter to Marxism Today, John Lloyd, a member of the Labour Party, writer for the Financial Times and advocate of the Swedish market system, has suggested that Jacques cannot continue to pay lip service to Marxism while rejecting everything that the CP has always meant by the term (New Socialist, January 1990). Lloyd is quite correct: if Jacques is to continue to accept that Leninist ideology is irrelevant and also that class analysis is redundant, then why pose as a Marxist? Why not go the whole way and admit that he and his fellow “communists" are opponents of socialism/ communism and are simply interested in trying to make the capitalist market-system work well? Incidentally, the same question can be put to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Of course, there are still the Trotskyists. These are the Leninists who want it both ways: they hold passionately to the Leninist dogma, which the CPGB has thrown overboard, but whenever the results of Leninism are pointed out to them they cry in unison, “Nothing to do with us. It was all Stalin's fault”. This is crass historical idealism: as if one man turned Russia from a home of revolutionary socialism into a police state. The fact is that Stalin did nothing that Lenin, the authoritarian statist, had not begun. Furthermore. Trotsky, who was an accomplice of Lenin and was the leader of the massacre of the Krondstadt sailors as well as the advocate of the Bolshevik policy that trade unions must be subservient to the state employers, could not have ruled the Bolshevik dictatorship in any significantly different way from Stalin. At least the now-dying New Communist Party can be credited with defending unto the last the hideous consequences of their Leninist recipe: the Socialist Workers Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party want the recipe to be used, but demand the right to spit out the cake.

All in all, the British Left is in a huge mess. It is a mess of their own design. Ever since the formation of the Communist Party in 1921 the Socialist Party has warned them of the fallacies inherent within the Leninist strategy. In the 1930s our party was called fascist by the CP because we exposed the crimes of Stalin in the pages of this journal. It was official CP policy to break up our meetings. The Leninist Left is now left with a discredited record and no future. Despite our political hostility to them, we are bound to feel some sympathy for those workers who have wasted their lives in a cause which is now so rapidly crumbling before their eyes. Some of the workers who joined the Leninist parties in the early days were conscious of the iniquities of the profit system, often well read in Marx, and frequently active in the fights over wages and conditions which wage slaves must inevitably enter. These were the deluded workers who would talk endlessly about how well-off were workers in Eastern Europe, how rumours of dissent in those countries were mere CIA propaganda and how happy workers would be here if they were governed by a Gierek or a Brezhnev. How utterly mistaken they were; what an immense dis-service to the cause of world socialism they unintentionally caused.

After Leninism

Talk of a crisis of socialist ideas is much in the air. Thatcher, in her New Year message, said that the 1980s had been the decade in which socialism was shown to have failed. What has actually failed is state capitalism and the Leninist illusion that the state can run the profit system in the interest of the class which is exploited for profit. Leninists of all descriptions are in a dizzy crisis, the seeds of which are to be found in the illusory belief that the capitalist revolution in Russia in 1917 led to the establishment of socialism.

As far as real socialists are concerned, we have no awful record of lying and self-deceiving to explain away. Far from suffering from a crisis of ideas, recent events in Eastern Europe have served to clear the air of a number of foolish illusions about “socialist countries” which we have had to waste too much of our time having to expose as false. Indeed, now that the Labour Party has come out in its indisputably capitalist colours and the Kremlin is admitting that its job is to run the market profitably, just like all the rest of the capitalist governments, the task of socialists faces fewer obstacles. We can state the case for a world society without property, classes, states or money and only the most stupid of opponents will be able to tell us that that is what the Labour or Communist parties stand for. More clearly than ever it is apparent that there is only one Socialist Party in Britain. We have always been the only ones to stand for the establishment of a genuinely socialist world community; now we are the only ones to say that that is what we stand for.

Never having been taken in by the dogmas of Leninism or the myth of “socialist nations", the Socialist Party stands with a reputation which advertises the validity of our principles. Here in the West the profit system wears the mask of freedom. While ambulances are run by cops and soldiers, because the state thinks so little of workers' health that they would rather let us die than pay the ambulance workers above the rate of inflation; while the monopolised press tells lies with impunity and BBC employees are vetted by MI5 before they are allowed to report the news; while the inner cities fall prey to the Crack Culture and the Arthur Daley business ethics; while kids sleep in cardboard boxes and fifteen million British workers can only exist on state hand-outs; while Thatcher spits out the rhetoric of militaristic jingoism and all parties relegate human needs to the good health of the Stock Exchange, the workers of Eastern Europe are being offered this bogus freedom as a prize for their struggle against their pseudo-Communist masters.

Socialists stand in hostility to the boss class of the West and the East; whether they pretend to dictate on the workers' behalf or they are undisguised legalised robbers, we are out to end their power, and to expose the ideologies which have allowed them to hold it this long. Socialism is not dead: it has not yet been tried. And now that we can bury not just the corpse of Lenin but the myths of Leninism, it is a great time to be in the struggle for a society freed from the Dictatorship of Capital.

Steve Coleman

Has CND learnt nothing? (1980)

From the August 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The eminent historian, Professor E. P. Thompson, is not a very foolish man, although the eminent Catholic preacher, Monsignor Bruce Kent, undoubtedly is. Yet both of them have combined their energies to lead the re-enactment of what must be the most pious and futile reformist campaign of the twentieth century: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. At its peak, in the mid-sixties, 100,000 marchers could be rallied by CND to express their opposition to nuclear arms. The result of the marching and the songs of protest and the moral cries for peace had all the potency of Canute before the waves: governments went on stockpiling arms of ever-increasing ferocity in their effort to expand and protect their areas of capitalist domination.

Leading Labour politicians were among the ranks of CND in the sixties, but what became of their pacifist sentimentalities when in office? The Labour Party, just like their Tory rivals, is forced to run the squalid military operations of the system it presides over when in power. While in opposition, opportunists like Joan Lestor and Michael Foot commit the next Labour government to all kinds of futile, but vote-catching reforms: they promise to remove Cruise missiles and to spend no more than at present on nuclear bombs. Even if the hypocrites break with tradition and do what they have promised, the world will be no closer to peace and security. Opposition to certain kinds of militarism is not enough. The widespread loss of civilian lives at Dresden in 1945 was no less atrocious because it was carried out by “conventional”, rather than nuclear, warfare; the military threat in Ireland is not diffused because only bricks and bullets are commonly used; all wars are damaging to the health and safety of the working class, whether they are based upon nuclear warheads or bows and arrows. Instead of attempting to eradicate militarism, CND merely seek to limit it.

The pleas of workers to their governments to stop nuclear armaments failed on the last occasion and they will fail this time. In 1960 the first issue of the journal, International Socialism claimed

The Campaign (for Nuclear Disarmament) has been successful in two ways. It has been outstanding in that, year by year, it has brought more people into the anti-Bomb protest, doing today what the slump did between the two World Wars in the matter of baptising (sic) a new generation with political realities. Less successfully but of at least equal importance, it has edged, be it ever so cautiously and suspiciously, towards the centre of alternative power in our Bomb-ridden society.

Naive idealism of this sort was harshly exposed in the years to come. For the Aldermarston marchers of the sixties strode on to the complacent reformism of the Labour Party, the pro-Russian unilateralism of the Communist Party, the adventurism of anarchism, the sentimentality of “flower power”, or mere cynical respectability. Most of the participants in CND learned little about what causes war: they did not go on to challenge the centre of social power (or even know where it was); they did not stop a single working class life from being lost in a war. Indeed, many of those whose moral pacifism took them into CND in the early sixties found themselves supporting one of the armies in the Vietnam war a few years later. There are currently 5,000 paid-up members of CND (Guardian, 23.6.80) and recruitment may be expected to rise rapidly in the months ahead. The recruits will generally be quite sincere workers whose attitude to socialism is that it sounds like a good idea, but that it is hopelessly Utopian. But their hope for a capitalist system without war is the real Utopia and as Karl Marx wisely observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, when historical events happen twice they happen “the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.”

A leading player in the CND farce Act II will be the Communist Party, the historical role of which has been to defend the turns and somersaults in Kremlin foreign policy. In 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Communist parties of Europe unequivocally condoned that mass destruction of working class life as a means of defeating one of the national adversaries of Russia. L'Unita, the paper of the Italian CP, observed at the time, in an article entitled In The Service Of Civilisation,

The news that an atomic bomb was dropped by the American Air Force has made an enormous impression throughout the whole world, and has been received on all sides with a sense of panic and condemnation. This shows, it seems to us, a curious psychological perversion and a doctrinaire obedience to a form of abstract humanitarianism.

Earlier in 1945 The Daily Worker, paper of the British CP, was blatantly suggesting that

The employment of the new weapon on a substantial scale should expedite the surrender of Japan. Valuable lives in the Allied nations will have been saved by the new discovery.

No member of the Communist Party is entitled to cry in moral indignation about the callous murder of millions of Japanese workers in 1945, for their party had been the cynical advocates of such action.

It was only after 1945 that the CP changed its mind about the Bomb, but not because of any “abstract humanitarianism”. The reason was that once the Cold War commenced, the echoers of the Kremlin feared American superiority in military technology. Fear of Russian disadvantage in a war against America is why the Communist Party of Great Britain supported CND and the policy of unilateral disarmament. Those who oppose war have a duty to expose the grotesque expenditure of resources on arms by the Warsaw Pact no less than NATO.

Even some members of the CP have recently been forced to take up a more critical attitude towards Russian state capitalism. But such occasional criticism (however mild) has alienated many of the hard-line CP Stalinists, who split from the party in 1978 to form the New Communist Party. This new party is also pledged to support the revived CND, although one detects from their pamphlet, Anti-Sovietism—How To Tight It And Why, that their concern for disarmament is somewhat one-sided. The pamphlet tells us that the urgent task of the world working class is to defend the USSR from attack (p. 3), that the Russian tanks which invaded the streets of Prague in 1968 were merely intended to defeat “counterrevolutionary attempts to turn back the clock and reinstate capitalism” (p. 6) and that Russian workers “will never be drawn irresponsibly into war, or used as pawns in the interests of imperialism” (p. 11). The NCP is just the pro-Russian equivalent of the Tory party; all patriots, be they of the Left, Right or Centre, are betrayers of the working class interest.

Socialists oppose all war

It is a creditable boast that the Socialist Party of Great Britain is the sole political organisation in this country to have consistently opposed every war thrown up by capitalism. This is not because we are moral pacifists, but because as Marxist materialists we ask one question about all wars: In whose interest are we being asked to fight? In the wars of the profit system, we are urged — often compelled by law — to risk death and mutilation in a battle between rival capitalist interests over the ownership and control of raw materials, markets and strategic locations. As the working class does not stand to gain from the expansion of their masters' power, the one policy for class conscious workers is to refuse to fight in any capitalist war. The socialist objective goes beyond the negative refusal to fight: we stand for the removal of the root cause of war—the system of capitalism which is the cause of all modern social problems.

Socialists share the fears expressed by many members of CND that sophisticated means of killing may be used to wipe out whole sections of the human race. Who can think without fear of the

 

fact that the British government — a relatively small military power — is currently spending £1.3 million an hour on so-called defence? Who can read the HMSO Civil Defence leaflet, Protect and Survive, and feel anything but hatred for a “civilisation” which can soberly contemplate such brutal destruction? In the section of the leaflet entitled Challenge to Survival we are informed that

Everything within a certain distance of a nuclear explosion will be totally destroyed. Even people living outside the area will be in danger from heat and blast and fall-out.

As for the “lucky” survivors:

After a nuclear attack there will be a short period before fall-out starts to descend. Go around the house and put out any small fires. If anyone’s clothing catches fire, lay them on the floor and roll them in a blanket . . .  If a death occurs while you are confined in the Fall-Out room, place the body in another room and confine it as securely as possible. Attach an identification.

Those workers who join CND want a future without nuclear fall-out. But they are hopelessly wrong if they believe that CND or any other peace campaign will avert the threat which they fear. The fight against warfare can only be practical if linked to the democratic political fight for a new social order in which the means of living are owned and controlled by the whole community. To die for capitalism would be tragic; to live in the belief that capitalism can be humanised is pathetic; to organise for socialism is our only hope.

Steve Coleman

Against the Left (Part 5) (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE ROAD AHEAD

The English working class had been gradually becoming more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point when it was nothing but the tail of the "great Liberal party", i.e. of its oppressors, the capitalists. Its direction had passed completely into the hands of venal trade union leaders and professional agitators. (Letter from Marx to Liebknecht. February 11th, 1878)

Reading the above, one's immediate reaction is that things haven't changed very much. The working class is still supporting its oppressors, but today the party which pretends to stand for the workers is Labour, not Liberal. Professional trade union bureaucrats, with their social contracts and their productivity deals, still try to manipulate the workers. The lesson of the First International has yet to be learnt: that the working class must emancipate itself. At a glance it would seem that socialism is a distant prospect. But in fact, there is evidence to suggest that some are rejecting the policies of the Left, even if they are not turning to socialism. Let it be clear that we do not recommend workers to abandon Left Wing ideology so as to turn to the Right. To stop voting Labour in order to vote Conservative or Liberal or not at all is to turn them from one pointless exercise to another.

This series has considered the three main tendencies on the British Left: Labourism, Stalinism and Trotskyism. (We have not examined other currents, such as Maoism or anarchism, because they are relatively insignificant today). In this concluding article it is worth posing the question: what are the prospects for the Left in the days ahead?

Still the most popular organisation by far on the Left is the Labour Party. In a sense it is incorrect to see the Labour Party as a single party as it is made up of a collection of local cliques, affiliated trade unions and political factions. The vast majority of Labourites would not see themselves as Marxists, revolutionaries or even Left wingers. A minority within the Labour Party aims to move it in a "leftwards" direction, by which is meant more nationalisation and even more welfare reforms. Remind a Labour Leftist that, despite six Labour Governments and endless reform legislation, we are not a fraction closer to socialism and he will doubtless agree with you. The problem, he will tell you, is that Labour has the wrong leaders. Alas, the memory of the Labour Left is at fault. Recall the election for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1963. The spokesman of the Labour Left Tribune, had this to say about one of the candidates:

He has not only qualities of political acumen, political skill and survival power which no one denies him. Other considerable qualities too for a Labour leader—a coherence of ideas, a readiness to follow unorthodox courses, a respect for democracy . . . above all a deep and genuine love of the Labour movement (Tribune 22 February, 1963)

Who was this man of impeccable qualities who was about to guide Labour in the required direction? It was none other than Harold Wilson, that well known lover of the working class. Well, Wilson won the leadership and Labour won the 1964 election. What did Tribune have to say about Wilson's 'considerable qualities" when he was Prime Minister?

Socialist principles have been tossed aside with almost indecent cynicism and casualness. Racial discrimination in Britain has been condoned and strengthened. American butchery in Vietnam has been actively supported and encouraged. Social welfare and economic development in Britain have been sacrificed to carry out a reactionary economic programme at the best of international finance capital. What of the Left leaders in Parliament? Tell them off on your fingers, comrades, and think of their words and deeds in recent months while the Labour movement has been sold down the river. It is a sad picture and I can personally neither see nor offer any excuses. Are we finished, we of the Labour Left? (Malcolm Caldwell in Tribune, 20 August, 1965)

In his letter of resignation from the Labour party on 24 September, 1965, Alan Dawe, the paper's education correspondent, wrote in Tribune

We are not right to view the Labour party and its latter day works as having anything to do with Socialism. They don't, they won't and it is time we faced up to it.

Since experiencing the effects of Labour Governments large numbers of Labour activists have faced up to the non-socialist nature of their party. Labour is further from its original sentimental intentions than ever before. As we stated in an earlier article, Labour has never stood for Socialism, but was originally intended to defend the working class within capitalism. Its predictable failure adds weight to the contention that wage labour and capital can under no circumstances have coinciding interests. Attend public meetings or branch meetings of the Labour Party and you will witness its diminishing size and prestige; some Labourites have turned to racist and fascist alternatives. Others remain in the political wilderness. Will they turn to socialism?

Since the death of Stalin, numbers and influence of the Communist Party have been declining at a rapid rate. Its stability was shaken by pro-Maoist splits, and by the reaction to Hungary in 1956 (which gave rise to New Left Review). During that period the Communist Party has been in a dilemma between maintaining rigid adherence to Moscow or becoming an openly social democratic (reformist) party like its Italian and French counterparts. In 1977 the new draft of The British Road to Socialism, the CP's policy statement, strongly supported the 'eurocommunist' line, thus rejecting the old Bolshevik slogans for modern reform demands. ideally, the CPGB would now like to unite with the Labour party, but the possibility seems unlikely as Labour bends over backwards to convince world capitalism that is is as 'safe' and 'respectable' as the Conservative party. Eurocommuism has caused a split in the CPGB, with a loyal group, loyal to the 'Soviet Fatherland', leaving to form the New Communist Party. In its pamphlet The Case For The New Communist Party, the crisis of British Stalinism is ably summarised:

The decline in membership and Morning Star circulation accelerated. The Young Communist League collapsed into a tiny unorganised sect . . . At the base of the party the crisis in organisation was even more clear. Thousands of members were no longer organised and many did not even pay their nominal monthly dues of 25p. The tendency grew for branches to appear in public only at elections or at Christmas bazaars. Consistent and regular political work by branches was now quite rare. Meanwhile there grew a number of groups supporting various brands of Trotskyism and ultra-Leftism. A new generation of potential revolutionary fighters were being diverted into anti-communist and anti-soviet groups. (p. 7)

The New Communist Party has pledged itself to maintain the pro-Kremlin line which the CP has decided to play down. Few workers treat seriously this effort to win faith in Russian state capitalism. The CP is destined to continue its squalid struggle for respectability, during which it could even fuse with the Labour Party or, more likely, go out of existence.

Many workers who would in the past have joined the Communist Party are today attracted by the Trotskyists groups, especially the Socialist' Workers Party. These parties would seem to be on the crest of a wave, but it must be remembered that their membership is based upon the opportunism of reform demands. The Right To Work Campaign, for instance, has been a useful source of members for the SWP. Once the present crisis ends, however, and labour is needed to expand the economy, those who have been attracted to the unemployed lobby because they were out of work will probably leave. A membership based on immediate demands will decline if and when the issues they fight for are temporarily solved. Capitalism is always capable of removing resistance by enacting reforms. Evidence of this is the high turnover in membership of parties like the SWP and the WRP. That is why the SPGB has always appealed to workers as a class and not as people suffering from this or that problem.

To imagine that the political situation has remained unaltered for the last hundred years would be to reject the Marxist theory of history. The working class does learn from its experience. It learns slowly and at the expense of its mistakes, but it is that factor—the ability to learn from history—which differentiates humans from animals and which makes the probability of Socialism more than a question of idealistic hope. Marx and Engels, in the last century, thought that socialism was only a matter of years away, as did the founders of the SPGB in 1904. Modern socialists are less ready to predict the course of the future, but for the general prophecy that if capitalism continues the working class can expect misery and if socialism is established we can look forward to hitherto unexperienced freedom. Socialism is not inevitable unless the working class seriously organises for it. Support for the left is support for utopianism in the extreme. The only solution to the historic problem of the working class lies in its own elimination as a class.

Steve Coleman

• Against the Left - Part 1
• Against the Left - Part 2
• Against the Left - Part 3
• Against the Left - Part 4

Parting With Leninism (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Extracts from an email received from a reader who has recently broken with a Leninist organisation, the New Communist Party (publishers of the 'New Worker')

"Act in haste and repent at leisure." So runs the old adage and it is true for me, at least in respect of my joining the New Worker readers' group. Actually, I was debating whether or not to continue my subscription at all and when I finally decided to do so I thought it might be best to become more actively involved. However, the more I read the more aware I became of too much that is indefensible.

By no means does this apply to everything. Indeed, Ray Jones' article, "What have communists got against capitalism", was a clear and succinct summary of Marxism by which the case was well stated. I could hardly disagree with it and shall keep it for reference purposes. It is with the espousal of certain causes I must firstly take issue. Jones lists a number of immediate causes to be pursued: " . . . better wages and conditions, better education, better health services, better housing, a better environment, against war, against authoritarianism and injustice and for more democracy (workers' power), and against racism, sexism and homophobia, which can divide workers . . . "

Which brings me to the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea, i.e. North Korea] where some of these things may have been achieved, at least in part, but many are non-existent. Including the word "Democratic" in the state's title does not mean that state is so. In what meaningful sense can the word democratic be applied to North Korea? How can a party, the NCP, proclaim opposition to authoritarianism and yet ally itself with one of the most authoritarian states in the world, not forgetting Vietnam, another country in which the popular will finds no real expression? I'm sure there are all manner state bodies supposedly dedicated to demotic purposes, but the Dear Leader and his beribboned and medal-festooned generals seem unconcerned with any such institutions.

The use of the word "progressive" in the New Worker appears to be as part of an oxymoron as in, "progressive governments like those of Iraq (pre-invasion) and Syria" (Editorial, 20 October) As these two administrations were largely secular in the context of the Middle East, women did indeed achieve a measure of emancipation denied in more Islamic states. But this was within authoritarian states in which opposition was (is) ruthlessly suppressed and the use of torture commonplace. Both these states had (and probably have) imperialist ambitions of their own. Not on the scale of the USA, admittedly, nor do they have the military where with all, but that does not prevent them being aggressive states. To use the word progressive in relation to Ba'athist parties is to deprive it of any meaning or worse. Like Alice's Humpty Dumpty, it means whatever you want it to mean. How can it be that communists are prepared to give support to some of the most reactionary regimes and movements in the world?

The same editorial ran, "The Muslim community is under attack because it is almost entirely opposed to Anglo-American imperialism's 'war against terror' which is no more than a war against Muslims." Capitalism, and therefore Imperialism, does not give a damn for religion, for any race or creed. Profit alone is its motivation and that, in a competitive world, means geo-political control over markets and resources. Of course it will use differences between people, race, religion, football (useful worldwide to reinforce national allegiances), to divide and weaken potential opposition. This can be clearly seen in Iraq at the moment, where there is a far greater toll of the indigenous population due to inter-Muslim strife than is presently due to coalition military action. In fact, one group of Muslims, the Sufis who were viciously persecuted by Saddam Hussein's "progressive" regime, were freed from their terrible incarceration following the fall of the Ba'athists.

Having read the above the obvious questions are, why did I renew my subscription to the New Worker and why did I join the reader's group? Having posed them both to myself I conclude that I was trying to hang on to something that has been a significant part of my adult life. Even since I first became involved in politics in my later teens I have been ideologically torn between two quite incompatible understandings of Marxism, the Leninist model and the very much more libertarian approach of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

The attraction of the Leninist model is that it offers the seeming possibility of immediate action and demands with the ultimate goal, Communism, in mind. But, however laudable they may be reforms become the political objective in themselves, they are the reason the Trade Unions established the Labour Party. They are not and cannot be stepping-stones to the revolution. A revolution to vanquish capitalism and establish socialism can only happen through the active agency of the working class; it cannot be carried out by a vanguard party on its behalf. This is the Leninist fallacy, for if the working class is so motivated it does not require some pre-existing party to act as its surrogate. If a need for a disciplined vanguard party exists then the working class is not ready to seize the moment, the vast majority are still integrated into the capitalist ideological mindset. Then, should the vanguard party take power it inevitably ends up ruling a reluctant working class, the dictatorship over (not of) the proletariat, no matter that the members of that party are dedicated and sincere. Then the supposed final goal becomes enabler of tragedy.

For years I've intellectually, and arrogantly, justified the actions of Stalin, Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha and their ilk in terms of their life and death struggle for socialism with capitalist encirclement and intrigue. I have argued that the crimes laid at their door were largely trumped up and exaggerated or caused by a reaction to imperialist pressure. I have been little more than a left wing David Irving, doing injury to history, denying the victims, for the cause. A cause that was always doomed to fail when Lenin found himself master of a largely war broken peasant country which led him to establish a state that would become ever more entrenched rather than wither away. Trotsky would have made no difference had he assumed control after Lenin's death as he was of the same authoritarian ilk. The state capitalism that subsequently developed did serve the historical purpose of sweeping away feudalism in Russia and developed a working class that can now play its part in choosing socialism. As is the way with all forms of capitalism, state as well as free market, this was achieved at a dreadful cost paid by the workers.

Frustrating though it undoubtedly is, there can be no short cut to socialism. Either the vast majority decide to embrace it or it does not occur. Socialism is not inevitable, the conditions are ripe for it, but if workers the world over fail to implement it, then there is also the possibility of barbarism. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, all serving as paradigms of one dreadful possible future. Promoting the socialist cause is undoubtedly hampered by its association with totalitarian regimes both past and present or with the reformism of Labour, a seeming easier option of socialism without much of an effort, that has undoubtedly brought benefits only for them to be whittled away in the interests of profit.

Our world is faced by major threats from war and environmental disaster, both fuelled by the insatiable appetite capitalism has. There is a desperate need for socialism, but it's not to be found behind the barbed wire in North Korea. It is incumbent on all who award themselves the epithet communist to place their hands on their hearts and say, to themselves as much as to anyone else, whether they really see a future for humanity in such a place.

Dave Alton