The Enemy on the Left! - Liberation Movements (1973)

The Enemy on the Left! column from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

If we are talking of liberation movements, I suppose that the most remarkable success story has been achieved in Africa where in the course of a comparatively few years, something like four-fifths of the coloured population of the continent has been liberated from the rule of the white imperialists. Pretty well without exception, all the countries now ruled by native governments claim to be socialist (which is about as monstrous a misuse of the term as can be imagined). In this the coloured governments differ from the white rulers who still hold sway in the southern part of the continent. But one thing is common to all the dozens of countries in the whole of the vastness that is Africa — from Cairo to the Cape there is not a solitary foot of ground where a single vestige of freedom exists. In every single state, the only place for those who differ from the government is in prison, or the grave.

Black workers and peasants in countries like Kenya and the rest suffered great hardships in the struggle to oust the white rulers. And having achieved what they were conned into thinking was liberation, all they have actually got is an iron dictatorship almost invariably far harsher than the British or French who were supplanted. As as for material conditions, it is worth noting that in the course of a campaign initiated recently by the Guardian to expose the starvation wages being paid by white employers in South Africa about which all good liberal types are so righteously indignant, there appeared one letter in the paper from some courageous type in Kenya (who may or may not have been writing under a pseudonym) which said that the wages in that country were far lower than those which were being so violently (and of course correctly) condemned in South Africa. And this despite the fact that the cost of living was higher in Kenya. Such are the fruits of liberation. And lest any reader of the Guardian should imagine that this letter might be phoney or in some way exceptional, one needs only to recall the atrocious advert by the Nigerian government which appeared in that paper (and which was quoted at length in the Socialist Standard in October 1972) which canvassed potential employers with the promise of rather cheap black labour — sixpence an hour. Needless to say, the hypocrites on the Guardian who accepted the payment for that advert, conducted no crusade against the black government of Nigeria although these wages were but a small fraction of those being paid in South Africa. The reason is simple. Black is beautiful and the trendy lefties cannot get hot under the collar at the vicious regimes which have the advantage of being fashionable — and good for circulation.

When will workers, black or white, learn that the only liberation that counts is from the thrall of capitalism?

L. E. Weidberg

The Enemy on the Left! (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialists but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

The material in this month's column is drawn from an article in a recent issue of the intellectual periodical Encounter who in turn are quoting from the leading ultra-left magazine in West Germany, Kursbuch. The German paper featured reports from a number of contributors, all known for their leftist views, about conditions in some of the so-called "socialist" countries. There is not room in this column to give more than a sample of the quotes from these reports but one can mention at the outset the remark of the editor (himself a well-known German left-winger) that it is noticeable that members of western communist parties are prepared to travel around Europe, even to such places as fascist Greece, but carefully avoid places like Hungary or the Ukraine. "The comrades just don't want to look at revolutionary reality."

However, the contributors did take the plunge and we follow with some excerpts from their reports. "The social system of Czechoslovakia is not socialist, but centralist, bureaucratic and totalitarian." The reporter has shied off the term capitalist, but not bad for a left-winger. As for North Korea, the state is described as an "authoritarian, nationalist, Fuehrerstaat". I prefer the term "red-fascist" but we see what he means. The North Koreans are forced to honour Kim Il Sung and his family as a holy family. Schoolchildren must recite: "The leader loves all children; all children  love the leader". Shades of Stalin. Not to mention Hitler. Party functionaries speak to the citizenry like army commanders and nobody dares get too close to the limousines in which they drive to their own separate shops and private theatre entrances.

"Cuba has been turned by Castro and Guevera into a living hell." (Yes, the same Che who was such a cult figure among the leftist students only yesterday; the name means rather less today. Tomorrow: "Che Who?") Castro's rule is a "hyphenated monstrosity: Hunger — Fear — Chaos — Terror". The support for the régime comes from the "partisan aristocracy", the old cronies of Castro and the Officer Corps. This "closed group" lives in luxury and enjoys exclusive privileges. Their favourite car is the Alfa-Romeo deluxe 1750. "This is the new class which preaches self-denial and sacrifice to the masses and speaks lightly of 'material differences', which propagandizes for the New Man with a Rolex on the wrist and an Uppman cigar between the fingers." (Shades of Animal Farm; how these red-fascists don't change.) There are no fewer than 20,000 political prisoners — but you won't find leftist creeps like Tariq Ali shedding any tears for these poor devils when they attend Castro's junkets, or leftist scribblers like the Guardian's Gott. It remains to add, sadly, that the German editor entitles the article "The Dilemma of Socialism and State Power". Schweinerei!

L. E. Weidberg     

The Enemy on the Left! (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do  nothing but harm to the cause.

First, a  look at the title of this series. We all know what an enemy is, but what is "the left"? The matter is not as simple as it sounds. Was Nazi Germany "left" and Stalinist Russia "right"? How absurd, most people would say. Just the opposite. Yet the similarities between the two régimes were most marked. In particular, both countries were wage-slave societies where the wage-slave had practically no rights and where the concentration camp and the death penalty were the answer for those who dared question the actions of the rulers. And, as is well enough known, their differences were so unimportant that in 1939, the Hitler-Stalin pact gave the green light for the start of the holocaust.

So perhaps we will have to deal only with those people and parties who pretend to be socialist (maybe closing our eyes, for convenience, to the fact that the very word Nazi was only shortened for National Socialist; while as to the communists — who, in Marxian terms, are but synonymous with socialists, the term "red-fascist" is really nearer the mark.) Some readers may recall that the French writer and pseudo-socialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, once coined the slogan "No enemies on the left" in an endeavour to produce a "united front" of French pseudosocialists. The reality is, however. that it is precisely these leftists. all these people who masquerade as socialists, the Wilsons, the Foots in this country, the supporters of Brandt or Brezhnev, of Mao or Castro et al, who are the real villains of the piece. The reason is simple. In order to achieve Socialism, in a world such as we live in now where the objective conditions, the power to produce abundance to satisfy all human needs, have long been established, the only real obstacle is the subjective one of convincing the working class of the world that Socialism is the answer. It therefore follows that all these people who lead false trails merely produce the confusion as to what Socialism is all about, which, sadly, characterises almost the whole electorate over one hundred years after Marx and Engels had pointed the way ahead. And it is even worse that that. For not only do these people sow confusion, they also have the effect of producing revulsion against the very thought of Socialism among such elements of the working class who are prepared to think (or who have the time and energy to think after they have been through their day's rations of exploitation). Who would wish to be socialist who believes that Wilson's government was an example? Who would not be sick of the very idea of a communist (or socialist) society if that means anything like the vicious tyranny which exists for to see in places like Russia or China?

It is hoped that this brief introduction will have set the scene. In future issues we can deal with some of the activities of these leftist enemies of Socialism and of any progress towards a sane and humane society.

L. E. Weidberg 

The Enemy on the Left! - Jean-Paul Sartre (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apart from the conventional left, the Labourite and Communist elements, the pseudo-socialist political scene is also cluttered up with a plethora of fringe-leftists who call themselves Trotskyists, Maoists, International Socialists etc. and who (insofar as one can follow their varying lines) claim to be lefter-than-left or more socialist than thou. (Alice's answer to the Mad Hatter is perhaps relevant. She could not have more tea because she hadn't had any yet. Similarly, these proliferating groups cannot be more socialist than the Labour Party which is not socialist at all. Though it is true they could not be less, either.)

It is difficult to keep up with these endlessly splintering groups and practically impossible to gather what they really stand for but perhaps one can begin by mentioning an interview in the Guardian recently with Jean-Paul Sartre "widely acknowledged as the greatest living philosopher". (Not so long ago, the title of world champ was claimed for Bertrand Russell whose most philosophical moment had occurred when he mooted the dropping of an atom bomb on Moscow. Not bad for a life-long pacifist. If only Marx was still around to re-write The Poverty of Philosophy.) This French genius, hero of the would-be revolutionary students, now, it seems, calls himself a Maoist. What he was doing all his leftist life, before Maoism was thought of as a creed, the interview does not make clear. One recalls that at various times he has quarrelled with the French Communist Party and at other times he has supported them — including times when the Stalin terror has been at its most ferocious; but you can't really expect leftist philosophers to bother themselves with such trivia as the fact that 200 million Russian workers were held in a tyrant's grasp and untold numbers were being frozen and worked to death in forced-labour camps. One also recalls his association with Russell in the so-called Tribunal to try America for war crimes in Vietnam (of which there was no shortage, of course) which really boiled down to support for the victory of that kindly, freedom-loving "communist", Uncle Ho.

The interview, though it occupies four columns, never gets round to asking the Great Man why he is a Maoist or indeed what kind of an alleged socialist that animal is supposed to be. So one can only fall back on the assumption that the Maoists stand for the sort of régime that exists in China today: where Mao makes it clear, both in word and in deed, that he is himself a Stalinist. So we have the farcical position that the revolting students of 1968 who called the French Communist Party "Stalinist shit" are now personified by a philosopher who stands for Chinese Stalinist shit. A rose by another name indeed. But of course that sort of muddle is the inevitable fate of those who lurch from one fashionable nostrum to another without ever giving themselves the time to work out the real lesson of the present jungle world, in Russia, or China, or the West — that capitalism is the enemy and only an understanding proletariat can do anything about it.

Clearly, the workers will never learn that lesson from a Professor of Maoism. Instead of getting knowledge in their heads, their heads will be broken by the brutal arm of the state. For our Maoist makes it clear he does not hold with the "legal action" of voting and although he does not spell out what means the workers should adopt, it is clear that our Maoists are enemies on the left indeed.

L. E. Weidberg 

The Enemy on the Left! - New Statesman (1973)

From the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

Last month this column dealt with Tribune but that other fraudulent socialist paper, the New Statesman is of course just as guilty of these attempts (often all too successful) to con the working class out of their votes. I well remember in the '64 election, reading out at an SPGB meeting a leading article from that paper which actually went through the various issues and could not avoid showing that there was not a pin to choose even between the promises of Tory and Labour. But you should turn out the Tories because Wilson is such a good chap! You may find it difficult to credit that an "intellectual" paper could be so pathetic. And ironically, the same paper now tells its readers that Wilson pollutes the political atmosphere! It takes an "intellectual" rather a long time to spot a blinding glimpse of the obvious. But I wanted to deal with its attitude to democracy (which is an essential facet of Socialism). They recently ran an article on Kaunda's one-party state in Zambia. Now it is clear to the meanest intelligence that a one-party state us just a euphemism for a dictatorial tyranny. For it means that anyone who wishes to oppose the government (or is even suspected of such ideas) finds himself not in Parliament, not even on the hustings, but in a gaol, or a concentration camp, or cemetery. This is true whether the one-party is white Nazis or black Kaunda-ists.

Just to underline this the Guardian reported some time ago that the "socialist" Kaunda had taken to ending his meetings with a ringing slogan: "One State! One Zambia!" Consciously or otherwise taking a leaf out of Hitler's book, he might as well amend that to "Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Kaunda!" But the point here is that you might think that the NS article was a denunciation of dictatorship. What a hope! The writer was their "Africa expert", the same John Hatch who used to defend in the same NS the régime of that even worse black Hitler, Nkrumah. The article was an apologia from beginning to end. And to hell with those who rot in tyrants' gaols. These inverted racialists scream for "One Man, one vote" in South Africa or Rhodesia. Quite right, too. Why shouldn't blacks have votes> But when Kaunda or Nyerere, these pseudo-socialist darlings of the lefties, effectively decree "All blacks, no votes!" (for what is a vote without a choice?), the lefties organise no demos, break no embassy windows (not that emotional outbursts of that nature are any use, of course). They really are inverted racialists who say that black subjects of leaders like Kaunda whom lefties have spent their lives arse-licking are not fit for votes.

L. E. Weidberg

The Enemy on the Left! - Tribune (1973)

The Enemy on the Left Column from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

The antics (no other word will do) of the pseudo-socialists of the world — needless to say they are by no means confined to this country — fill just about half the acreage of every day's papers, so it is difficult to pick one or two items out of the available abundance for discussion in this column. If one sees something particularly gruesome from, say, Foot or Wilson or Nyerere (they are all socialists now, of course, even the grotesque Amin) one knows that tomorrow's press will produce something even more heinous. However, it should be instructive if this month we look at an item from one of the best-known left-wing papers in this country.

Tribune has of course been associated since its foundation with all the best Labour lefties from Nye Bevan (late, but I fear, unlamented) through his successor at Ebbw Vale, Foot, along with Atkinson, Allaun, Heffer and the rest of the menagerie. A few weeks ago they ran a piece getting all hot under the collar about a remark made by Reg Prentice who is on Wilson's front bench and is in fact his Minister for Unemployment designate. It seems that this pseudo had the impudence to say that a figure of 400,000 unemployed was "acceptable" and the Tribune pseudos were quite ready to tear him to pieces over it. First let us just have a think about the statement itself (which was not repudiated by Wilson or any other front-bencher to my knowledge). If one includes dependents, it means that about a million members of the British working class must find it acceptable to be members of the non-working class (I know they would find it acceptable if they were made members of the real non-working class, the capitalists, but I don't think that's what Prentice meant.) It appears, therefore, that the Labour leadership find the fate of a million people living on doles and social security in our so-called affluent society to be acceptable. How jolly of them. Whether it is acceptable to the million poor devils themselves, or whether anyone but a lunatic should support a party which finds this sort of thing acceptable, well, you don't really expect Labour politicians to lose sleep over that as long as they're all right Jack.

But the Tribune types are different? You could have fooled me. The Foots and the rest were all there at Westminster keeping their Labour government in power a few years ago when the unemployed figure was not 400,000 but 600,000. Acceptable or otherwise, Tribune MPs had to accept it, didn't they? And of course there was only one reason why the figure did not rise to a million (i.e. at least two million people suffering from the pernicious disease of capitalism) while Labour was in power. And that was that in 1970 the electorate threw them out, so that the honour of achieving the million was won by the Tories. It has long been clear to all but the wilfully blind that capitalism will produce its ups and downs in unemployment along with the other evils which afflict society, irrespective of whether the capitalist managers call themselves Tories or Labour (or, god help us, socialist). And it is just another of the crimes of the lefties that they hypocritically deride the Tory government for doing exactly the same sort of things which their own party did before them.

L. E. Weidberg