Weekly Worker 564 Thursday February 17 2005

Letters

Kornilov lesson
Week after week, comrade Brian Miller has condemned the Weekly Worker for insisting on the need to differentiate between anti-imperialists in Iraq, offering our support only to secular, democratic and working class forces. Comrade Miller foolishly argues that to positively discriminate in favour of progressive forces is somehow to undermine the right of national self-determination.

But, when it comes to a certain Musab al Zarqawi, instead of applying this abstraction concretely the comrade runs a mile! He favourably quotes Sami Ramadani, who states that “Zarqawi-style sectarian violence is … condemned by Iraqis across the political spectrum, including supporters of the resistance”, and by sleight of hand attempts to exclude Zarqawi from those deemed to be fighting the imperialists. Apparently al Zarqawi’s followers have “not particularly” been resisting the occupation, as they were responsible for ‘only’ six out of 2,000 anti-US armed actions in a given month last year. What is more, they are notorious for kidnapping and executing hostages (Letters, February 10).

You would have thought that, since the imperialists direct much of their fire at this “bogeyman”, comrade Miller would feel obliged to defend him all the more intransigently. But, no, to throw his own words back at him, he is just “too social-chauvinist and yellow” to “take sides”. He is too squeamish to accept that the kidnapping and execution of collaborators can be just as legitimate a tactic as directly attacking enemy troops (or, for that matter, contesting an election).

Comrade Miller’s confusion results from a failure to accept the primacy of programme, not the tactics employed (although, of course, the latter will certainly be informed by the former). That is why it is correct to refuse support not only to al Zarqawi, but to all other reactionaries amongst the Iraqi anti-imperialists.

At least comrade Miller distances himself from the nonsense about ‘military support’, as opposed to ‘political support’ (although, it has to be said, he still upholds the faulty method that underlies such terminology). Comrade Simon Keller, by contrast, while vaguely seeming to recognise the inadequacy of the phrases, asserts: “… the distinction between political and military support is not a Trotskyist invention. As the Bolsheviks’ bloc with Kerensky against Kornilov in 1917 makes clear, it is basic Leninism” (Letters, February 10).

I’m sorry, comrade, but there was no such bloc. On the contrary, two instructive pieces, written by Lenin during this period, explicitly ruled out any such notion. In the article, ‘Rumours of a conspiracy’, Lenin specifically condemned suggestions that the Bolsheviks were willing to cooperate militarily with forces politically loyal to the provisional government (the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries) against counterrevolutionary mobilisations. That would have meant that “there was a certain bloc, alliance or agreement between the Bolsheviks and the defencists [of Kerensky]” (VI Lenin CW Vol 25, Moscow 1977, p247).

This was completely impermissible for Lenin, who continued: “You do not conclude agreements or make blocs with people who have deserted for good to the enemy camp.” In fact, “Any Bolshevik who came to terms with the defencists ... would, of course, be immediately and deservedly expelled from the party” (ibid p251).

Lenin wrote his letter, ‘To the central committee of the RSDLP’, as the revolt of the counterrevolutionary general Kornilov menaced Petrograd. Yet, even with black reaction at the gates, Lenin blasted as “absolutely wrong and unprincipled” those “people (like Volodarsky) who slide into defencism or (like other Bolsheviks) into a bloc with the Socialist Revolutionaries, into supporting the provisional government”.

In my opinion, Lenin can be criticised here for seeming to rule out alliances with secondary enemies under all circumstances - especially as he himself had rightly been willing to enter into such episodic alliances in the past. But the point he was emphasising is clear and correct - there must be no active support for such secondary enemies:

“Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t you going to fight Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here ... we are fighting Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky” - either politically or ‘militarily’ (ibid pp289-90).

Lenin underlined that the mobilisation of the revolutionary masses against Kornilov meant that “... we must take into account the present situation. We shall not overthrow Kerensky right now” (ibid p289). In other words, it is essential to identify and concentrate your fire against the main enemy (eg, the US-UK imperialists in Iraq). This quite possibly means temporarily suspending our assault against other reactionaries (islamists and Ba’athists), without for a moment giving them an ounce of support. We must acknowledge the “dividing line” between the progressive and reactionary anti-imperialists.

That is the lesson comrades like Brian Miller and Simon Keller ought to take from Lenin’s writings on Kornilov.
Peter Manson
South London

Another slur
It is a measure of Michael Little’s incoherence that he simply ignores my arguments and instead substitutes banality and falsehood.

It is a smear to say the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is “neutral in the face of imperialist aggression”, since we opposed the war and oppose the occupation (Letters, February 3). The pious warning about the AWL eventually “siding with imperialism” is simply another slur. For us, building solidarity with the emerging Iraqi labour movement is central, and Little’s airy generalities about imperialism contribute nothing to this task.

It is also wrong to assert Saddam’s Iraq was “a non-imperialist country” - the war with Iran and the invasion of Kuwait suggest a bid by a sub-imperialist power for regional domination. And it is plainly absurd to suggest that “the military victory of all the forces fighting the imperialist invaders is necessary in order to set the conditions whereby the working class can militarily turn against the non-secular elements”.

The ‘resistance’ Little champions is made up of Ba’athists and fundamentalists. They have already attacked and killed workers and trade unionists. The regimes they want to create would have no place for an independent labour movement. Their victory would not create the conditions for the Iraqi working class to fight for its own liberation - that much is clear from the experience of Saddam’s Iraq and of Iran since 1979.

For Marxists, the real anti-imperialist force is the working class. The ‘resistance’ is no substitute.
Paul Hampton
AWL

No open borders
In my report of the London Respect meeting on January 30, I did not mention a particular contribution by the Socialist Workers Party’s Elaine Heffernan (Weekly Worker February 3). Her thoughts really deserve to be recorded, as a warning about the dangers of opportunism.

Comrade Heffernan felt the need to reply to my contribution, in which I urged Respect candidates to fight for open borders in the face of the current attacks on migrants by Tories as well as the Labour government. As someone who works with refugees, comrade Heffernan regularly gets wheeled out by the SWP to attack the demand for a radical response to the irrational hysteria around immigration.

As can be expected, she saw no need for current Respect policy to be changed. This merely calls for the “defence of the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers”, while ignoring the plight of so-called ‘economic migrants’. She said that instead of “posturing” in political meetings, questions like this one should be “solved on the ground” alongside “local refugee and asylum groups”: only if these groups demand open borders should we do so too.

Naturally, communists cannot put forward an effective programme if it is totally unconnected to the existing consciousness of the working class. However, advocating the subordination of our programme to the consciousness of one of the most marginalised and unorganised sections of society is a different matter altogether.

Unfortunately, though, this has been the recent approach of the SWP - and was perhaps expressed most clearly by Alex Callinicos back in 2001, when he attempted to justify the expulsion of the SWP’s American sister organisation from the International Socialist Tendency. The reason he gave was the US International Socialist Organization’s refusal to uncritically fuse with the emerging, so-called anti-capitalist movement.

Callinicos wrote at the time that “revolutionaries should make themselves part of the movement, starting not from their disagreements with other activists, but from the much larger area of agreement that united the entire movement”. In other words, revolutionaries should become “the best anti-globalisation activists” - failure to do so had underpinned the ISO’s “sectarianism”, wrote Callinicos at the time (see Weekly Worker March 15 2001).

This is the recipe for the tasteless opportunism we are currently witnessing from the comrades - be it their uncritical role in Unite against Fascism, their enthusiastic support for the liberal, charity-mongering Make Poverty History campaign, or their political collapse in the Stop the War Coalition.
Tina Becker
Hackney

Cheap labour
Back to the future? Phil Kent, having ignored my points about mass unemployment and the bosses’ luck in an expanding immigrant labour market which pegs wages to the floor, asserts that this process occurred in the 19th century with Irish immigration (Letters, February 10). In other words we are now back in time in the period prior to the creation of a national Labour Party and where workers have to compete with each over scraps.

If that is the case - and I agree that it is - by demanding borders to be more open and the EU to keep on expanding until it reaches Ankara and beyond, we willingly become recruitment officers for big business. Union leaders no longer fight to defend jobs, but agree to their export to cheap labour zones, whether they physically relocate or import cheap labour. That is the primary difference with the 19th century.
Evangelos Tzourtos
Haringey

Pointless?
Steve Whitehall-Smith points out that, while the CPGB’s draft programme has “plenty of pay and conditions-type economic demands”, we say there is no “inherent logic” in these that lead to socialist consciousness. So what makes our economic demands “revolutionary”, the comrade asks, while parallel demands by the likes of Respect are “pointless” (Letters, February 10)?

Fundamentally, this concerns the road to socialism itself. Unlike the bulk of the revolutionary left, we believe that the working class cannot raise itself to the level of a ruling class unless it prioritises the struggle for political democracy. The bridge to the economic liberation of our class is through political democracy, not the other way round.

At the level of economics, effectively the most radical demand we can advance is for working class management of factories and workplaces. An immediate demand that communists support, of course, but not one that focuses our class’s attention on its strategic revolutionary task - challenging the state itself. Everything must be subordinated to the task of the overthrow of that existing state by the working class - a profoundly democratic act.

The Communist manifesto puts it rather better than I could: “… the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie …” (my emphasis).

We do not state that economic demands are “pointless” - as comrade Whitehall-Smith says, they do indeed find their natural place in our draft programme and in fact they are vital. It is just that, in and of themselves, they will not bring liberation for our class or emancipation for humanity. The point is, they appear in our draft programme in the context of distinct, but logically connected sections. These start from an outline of the main features of the epoch and the nature of capitalism in Britain, through our immediate political and economic demands, to the character of our coming revolution, the workers’ government it will produce and the world process it will be a part of - the global transition to communism. All of this draws the reader towards “the inescapable need for all partisans of the working class to unite in the Communist Party” and fight for revolution (Draft programme of the CPGB p2).
Ian Mahoney
London

Deranged
For Steve Freeman, the closeness of the vote at the Socialist Alliance funeral on February 5 underlines the mistake made by the CPGB and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in failing to “mobilise their members” (Weekly Worker February 10). As is usual, however, it is the CPGB that really comes in for the most stick.

Apparently, we were “worse”, as we “put all [our] eggs in the Respect basket”. We were “demobilised” by the belief that “the only place to fight the SWP was in Respect”. Thus, come “the final battle”, our “troops were told to stay in their barracks”. This was “poor leadership”. The “best place” to challenge the SWP was at the February 5 SA funeral. Instead, the leadership of our organisation led its communist “troops” into a “thorough pasting” at last October’s Respect conference.

This is politically deranged, not to put too fine a point on it. First, it is clear that even if the ‘opposition’ had won the vote at the SA conference, it would have been near meaningless. The SWP turned its back on the alliance with the advent of the mass anti-war movement. Does comrade Freeman think that passing a resolution demanding the SWP leadership backtrack and rebuild the SA “as a campaigning alliance” would have any effect whatsoever?

Second, the comrade accepts that some form of “split” between the SWP and the SA was inevitable. So what real, concrete forces does he envisage being left to implement this “campaigning alliance” perspective? Who on earth are you talking about, Steve?

Third, and most bizarrely, the comrade believes the SWP scored only a “pyrrhic” victory at this SA farewell gig. As evidence of this, he notes that - apart from the top table apparatchiks - no SWPers spoke. As the SA conference was a “battleground chosen by us”, he believes the SWP was bogged down in the mud and unable to deploy its big guns.

Were we actually at the same conference? The demeanour of SWPers was surly and bored, not rattled. They had come to bury an unloved family member they lost touch with some time ago. This entailed enduring the unpleasant company of a hall of estranged relatives who had pitched up looking for a squabble, people they longer have any desire to speak to. It was a nasty, but necessary formality, despatched as quickly and painlessly as possible. They made sure the old bugger was planted, then scuttled off home.

The contrast with the main “ground” we have chosen to fight the SWP’s opportunism - Respect - could not be more dramatic. Over a whole range of key principles - the worker’s wage, open borders, abortion, secularism, working class socialism - we have forced this organisation (including its ‘big guns’) to politically justify its backsliding. Yes, it has won the votes - but these have been the real ‘pyrrhic’ victories.

Look at the different ways the two conferences were organised. SA national secretary and leading SWPer Rob Hoveman had emphasised that any alliance member during 2003 or 2004 was entitled to attend on February 5 - I believe I even heard the comrade talk about a “permissive” attitude to attendance in one meeting. Through a combination of lateness and being distracted, I actually strolled in without officially registering myself.

Then look at the extraordinary measures that Hoveman and leading SWPers took to ensure that not even one CPGBer made it to the floor of the 2004 Respect conference - including our comrades who had actually been elected as delegates! Even a CPGBer taking pictures was bustled out of the door. Yet we still managed to make a huge impact. In many ways, the politically significant parts of the conference - including the SWP hysteria directed against all critics - was provoked by the political hurt inflicted by our targeted guerrilla actions.

Meanwhile, generalissimo Freeman plays war games with imaginary battalions in the dodo-dead SA, issues the order ‘Charge!’ at brick walls, then takes it upon himself to offer the CPGB strategic advice about making war on opportunism.
Convinced, anyone?
Mark Fischer
London

SW platform
Jack Conrad’s call for Gregor Gall’s expulsion from the Socialist Worker platform of the Scottish Socialist Party is not, as Nick Rogers implied, “undemocratic and bureaucratic” (Weekly Worker February 10).

The key point is the difference between the discipline of a party and that of a faction. Lenin said: “A faction is an organisation within a party, united, not by its place of work, language or other objective conditions, but by a particular platform of views on party questions” (my emphasis, VI Lenin CW Vol 17, Moscow 1977, p265). Comrade Gall’s call for Scottish independence is in clear contradiction to the SWP’s claimed opposition to separatism and what it proclaims in ‘What the Socialist Workers Party stands for’, carried in Socialist Worker every week: “We oppose everything which turns workers from one country against those from another.” Surely this should be at the very centre of the work of the SW platform (or faction), given the SSP’s total collapse into left nationalism?

The SWP needs to elucidate its beliefs. Does it support a principled internationalist Marxist position or will it continue pandering to those who openly advocate the nationalist division of an historically united working class?
Huw Groucott
Sheffield

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