AMATEURS, ECONOMISTS AND SOUL-SAVED MANTRA-MONGERS
Much of your politics, as I have argued in debates with you more than once, consists of symbols and fetishes. A useful indication of the fetishistic way you function in politics is to be found in your strange choice of the word "amateur" with which you repeatedly describe our trade union work.
When I first came across your use of this term to dismiss our trade union work, I momentarily forgot who I was dealing with, and took it at its everyday meaning: something in our trade union work struck some of you as "amateurish". I thought, maybe that an issue of one of our Trade Union bulletins struck you as badly produced, or something like that.
But still, it was an odd comment on our trade union work, coming as it did from people who, though some of your
members are in trade unions, do no organized communist trade union work at all. From people who, if you were to start doing our sort of trade union work yourselves, could surely expect that your own work would, at least initially, be more, not less amateurish than ours is - a lot more, if your performance in the things that interest you, like "Leninism", is any indication!.
"Amateur" in such a context sounded vaguely familiar. Then I remembered where it comes from, and reminded myself of how the CPGB/WW operates in politics.
The description of our trade union work as "amateur" is a typical bit of CPGB/WW kitsch-Leninism, and , though in
itself it is pretty trivial, it will be instructive to examine it. It is transcribed, cribbed, copied out from Lenin's What Is To Be Done? - maybe unconsciously - and applied without any reference to the concrete situation you are supposedly dealing with or the one Lenin was dealing with; used, in fact, as auxiliary psychological buttressing for yourselves and those who will get the reference and the "Leninist" authority it conveys. "Amateur" is this context is for you a special word, a fetish word, a magic "Lenin" word!
It is a mildly bewildering, but I think representative, piece of CPGB/WW political fetish-mongering. Recite a suitable bit of "Lenin" mantra and all will be well! Find a plausible parallel in Lenin for any current dispute and, hey presto!, you can recite, or parody, "Lenin", and thereby win the argument! Stalinist scholastic Leninism rules - O K!
In What Is To Be Done, Lenin discussed the experience of isolated, "amateurish", local socialist circles in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. He was not deriding "trade union" work - illegal pre-trade union work was all that was then possible in Russia - as necessarily amateurish; still less was he commenting on the quality of the AWL's trade union work a hundred years in the future. Nor was he sending a letter across time to tell Jack and you that, yes comrades, you are right to ignore the economic class struggle and the British labour movement!
The early socialist circles Lenin was describing were not yet bound into a party, and had not had a political newspaper to unify their efforts and tie them together politically and ideologically. Their work was, typically, producing factory leaflets, which, often, did not rise to the level of communist (Lenin, of course, said Social Democratic) politics Some of them were influenced by the idea that because Russia, as all Marxists then thought, faced a Bourgeois and not a socialist revolution, the working class should leave politics - all questions of the overall running of society, including such questions as the fight to establish the bourgeois-democratic Republic - to the bourgeoisie, and concentrate on the economic struggle and the organization of the working class.
Lenin was arguing that these circles should organize themselves around the newspaper Iskra, which Plekhanov,
Martov, Lenin and others were producing, and urging them to join in creating the centralized revolutionary party which the Iskraites did establish in 1903.
That, a properly organized party producing literature that embodied the best that the movement as a whole could create and which dealt with all the political questions confronting Russian society from a consistently Marxist and working class point of view - that is what Lenin counterposed to the "amateurism" and "economism" of the circles.
In no sense was he against what they had been trying to do, nor did he think it premature (Lenin himself had produced factory leaflets; some of them are in his Collected Works.)
Far from denouncing the work these Circles did in "going to the working class", Lenin had a great deal of praise for their work, only deploring the one-sidedness that had developed in the absence of a party and a "central organ", and urging on them the overdue elevation of their work to the higher level Iskra was trying to promote.
Lenin's denunciations were reserved for the "ideologists", the people as he nicely put it, who were "infatuated with their own inadequacies", and reluctant to move on, those who believed the outmoded approach of the circles to be the best possible approach.
To Lenin, incidentally, the mirror-converse of the economists were those such as Peter Struve, a prominent Marxist in the 1890s, who, starting out as Communists, had come to counterpose the political struggle for republican democracy against the Tzar to organizing the workers. To Lenin, the "economists" were errant comrades, but the Struveite "democrats", even before they had fully hatched out as Liberals, were on the other side of the class line...
MARXISM IS NOT MIMICRY AND MUMMERY!
Marxism is not what you people too often seem to think Marxism is: mantras, mimicry and mummery! One of Lenin's favourite and most characteristic sayings was: "the truth is always concrete". Lenin used Marx as a guide to concrete analysis of his own conditions, not as a source of ready-made recipes and mantras - not as magic but as science in the making. There is no other Marxism. Or Leninism...
Your underlying idea on "amateur trade union work", etc., etc., seems to be that because Lenin criticised the political trend in Marxism which he called "economists", he was therefore at that time against "going to the working class", and therefore you do not have to, and everything is in order if you apply "Leninist" terms like "amateur", which Lenin 100 years ago used in the way I have described above, to the work of those who do not limit themselves as you do to a bit of propaganda - and gossip-mongering! - in and around the Socialist Alliance .
This isn't just bad politics. It also testifies to an astonishing incapacity to understand the history of our movement.
It is a question of whether we go to the history of our movement, to such experiences as that of the Russian movement 100 years ago, to study and learn, or to cull mantras, fetish words and suitable Lenin-certified curses.
The issue of whether or not socialists should do work other than the sort of stuff you do on "the political front" - that is, do class struggle and labour movement work - is, to my mind, a dispute that involves nothing less than the to-be-or-not-to-be questions of Marxist politics
The idea, which I have heard from some of you, that it is a question of resources and of priorities really will not wash. It is a question of politics and of political understanding, and of what one thinks even a small revolutionary
organization must be, or try to be.
It is a strange experience, to find oneself having to convince self-proclaimed Marxists and Leninists of the need for serious involvement with the actually existing working class and its movement. I can't recall encountering such an attitude as yours to the labour movement and "economism" since the last of the once-numerous space-cadet Maoists of the 1960s and 70s did everybody, especially themselves, a mercy and disappeared up their own "theory". You are not precisely on that level, but you too "theorise" yourselves into a sterilizing "anti-economism" that amounts to a false and self-mutilating attitude to the working class and its movement.
In any case our differences can only be resolved by bringing our supposedly common principles, concerns and
objectives to bear in concrete analysis of our specific conditions. Instead you put on the invisible imaginary mantle of "Lenin" and speak in tongues: "you are amateur because you are not us."
The business of you denouncing our T. U. work as amateur is, of course, trivial, but it points to what is, as far as I can see, your dominant method and psychology in politics. This is what I meant by "mummery" above.
For me it conjures up images out of an old Hollywood movie, or an old-style kids' serial, in which the seemingly
inoffensive little man with the fez or the turban suddenly goes blank eyed, raises himself up to his fullest height and, transcending himself, speaks in a voice not quite his own: "You are Economists! You are amateur! When I speak in this voice and paraphrase sacred texts, I partake of the nature of the sacred texts and of the Deity, I speak in the name of the Deity. The sacred words give me the strength of the Deity. Occasionally, I become the Deity. Lenin c'est moi!"
You seem to live in the delusion that by citing bits of Lenin like that, out of context - and sometimes, perhaps
unconsciously - as mantras, you acquire some of Lenin's qualities, and your arguments thereby acquire what Lenin's arguments acquired from concrete analysis and a coherent sense of the great project "The truth is concrete". Lenin used Marx as a guide to analysis, not as a source of magic mantras; and he didn't use Marx's words as a Catholic uses his rosary beads, for comfort and reassurance.
This, I submit, is your approach; and, I submit, it is ridiculous: witch-doctor stuff!
ALL MONARCHS ARE MONARCHS, BUT SOME ARE LESS MONARCHICAL THAN OTHERS!
I've debated with you half a dozen or more times in the last few years. Time and again I've made the same point: you do not when you are being "Leninist" translate Lenin out of the Russian specifics of his time and place into circumstances that are ours and were not Lenin's and apply the principles, traditions and methods of Marx and Lenin to a concrete analysis of our conditions. You transcribe Lenin, literally and often foolishly.
You mimic Lenin. Frequently one can identify the text of Lenin's you are mimicking and parodying, as with the text on Rosa Luxemburg referred to above (from which you spin not Leninist political hardness, sharpness and clarity but a centrist evasion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)and the stuff about "amateurism'.
Take another example of your habit of operating by transcribing Lenin literally, with little reference to concrete
analysis, of either Lenin's conditions or your own - the Monarchy. I've made this point in a number of debates with you, because the question of method which it brings out clearly seems to me to be central to your entire politics, and at the root of most of what divides CPGB and AWL politically.
We too, of course, want to get rid of the monarchy. (But so does Rupert Murdoch...). In a revolutionary situation, the reserve powers of the monarchy would, indeed, be a weapon for the reactionaries, etc. Even so, the British monarchy could be sloughed off tomorrow with little else of importance changing in British society. And the chance that communists could put themselves at the head of a vast anti-monarchist movement so roused up on "The Democratic Questions" that a profound social reorganization might thereby become possible, is nil. Absolutely nil!
(I suspect that your strange vision of Britain here can only be understood in terms of the old Stalinist dogmas about a two-stage revolution,even in advanced countries - see below - and some background, or subconscious, notion that because the monarchy and other pseudo-feudal relics have survived - through three and a half centuries of bourgeois rule! - the "bourgeois-democratic revolution" has yet to be completed in Britain. This strange notion is less of an eccentric rarity than it should be. It was in circulation outside Stalinist ranks, amongst the New Left Review people, in the mid-sixties. E. P. Thompson debated it with them, and they later shamefacedly admitted that Thompson had been right.)
The British political system does not, whatever the constitutional conventions say, really revolve around the monarchy.
It was different in Russia, where the Tzar was an absolute monarch, and then a "slightly constitutional" ruler. Lenin and the Bolsheviks related to that monarchy as what it actually was. If we follow Lenin's method instead of literally
transcribing what Lenin truly said about the Russian monarchy, we will relate to Britain's monarchy as what it is, not as what Tzarism was. We will, as Lenin did, analyse our own real political world and develop politics appropriate to it.
Instead, the CPGB/WW transcribes and mimics Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the Russian monarchy as if doing that can tell us about our own situation.
You try to relate to the British monarchy, and through it to British society, in a way that would only make sense if that monarchy is something like the monarchy Lenin confronted, which it certainly is not, and if British capitalist society is something like the society Lenin confronted, and truly described as "semi-Asiatic", which it certainly is not. By avoiding concrete analysis, and behaving as purely textual "Leninists", you develop what are essentially fantasy politics about British society and about the British monarchy (as you do about Scots nationalism, and other
"democratic" questions).
Fantasy politics is passive politics, rearranging things - in this case, old texts - in your head. The point, Mark, as Marx didn't quite say, in not to juggle with images of reality in your head, or with old texts that once reflected now vanished realities, but to come to grips with your own reality as it is in, so to speak, its own right. The Marxism and Leninism that can help us in this work consists of the method of analysis, and the help in using it that can be got from study of the analyses made by a Marx or a Lenin - not the mimicry and mummery and the priestly arts of Stalinist "textual" Leninism.
Transcribing rather than translating Lenin from Russian conditions to British conditions, what you miss out, for Lenin on Russia and yourselves in Britain now, is precisely this heart of Lenin's, as of all real Marxism:- concrete analysis.
Pursuing the childish politics of mimicry and transcription, you let it crowd out the real stuff and proper concerns of serious Marxists and communists in our conditions, the labour movement and the class struggle on all its fronts, including the trade union front.
It vitiates even your concern with the democratic questions: instead of relating to issues of substance - like, for example the accelerated erosion of even the older British bourgeois democracy - you focus on "Big" empty questions that your method of cribbing from old Russian texts suggest to you are of fundamental importance, (and whose analogues were of fundamental importance in Russia...), like, for example, the breadth of the choices in the referendum on Scottish devolution - pursuing, it seemed to me, the mystical dimension of this Big, BIG, BIG question that would have brought out its real revolutionary potential, trying, somehow, to take it out of the hands of the Blairites...
It is exaggeration, but I think, permissible exaggeration, to say that at the heart of what divides the CPGB/WW from AWL politically, is your incapacity to work out the implications of the fact that you do not live in Russia in the year 1903!
Your "Leninism" is to Leninism what karaoke is to proper singing! (Possible title of someone's future memoirs: "From 'The Leninist' to the Lenin Karaoke Club"!)
Your addiction to the politics of fantasy-projection, mimicry and Karaoke-Leninism stands between the CPGB/WW
and growing up to authentic Marxist politics! I mean, of course, Trotskyism; the politics of those who fought Stalinism from the beginning.
THESE PROBLEM S ARE ROOTED IN THE HISTORICAL TRADITION YOU CLAIM
Our root differences in method and in politics lie, as far as I can make sense of your tendency, in the fact that you are formed in Stalinism and still display the patterns of Stalinist politics.
I am not, of course, dismissing you as just Stalinists. Afghanistan notwithstanding, you have come a long way from Stalinism. Yet, keeping that in mind, you are, it seems to me, still recognizably an ex-Stalinist formation. Like John Cleese's famous "ex-parrot" which even after it had lost the power to squawk and hop about as it used to, was still identifiable by its shape, anatomy and plumage as a sort of parrot, you too continue to have a recognizable physiognomy.
You are one of the vast legion of tendencies that have, at different times over many decades, come out of Stalinism politically perplexed and clueless about authentic communist politics, but still hypnotized by the democratic and "national liberation" slogans, demands an concerns which, from the mid-1920s onward, have formed the "operational" politics of the Stalinist parties.
Such politics were initially flags of convenience, but, over time, they entered into the bone, flesh and mind of the
Stalinist parties. This politics became dominant even in a country like Britain in the second half of the 20th century, where the real CPGB campaigned for "British independence" from the USA. The "Communist" Parties did the same in every country of Western Europe.
Essentially for these parties - or for most of them most of the time - "Socialism" was something being built in the
'Soviet Union'. The rest of the world was different.
Not only in Britain, and France and Italy, and Ireland, etc, etc, in the second half of the 20th Century, but even in
Germany as early as the years before Hitler took power, even when they were crazily ultra-left, the Stalinists centrally concerned themselves with advocating "democratic" slogans, like "national liberation of Germany" (from the Versailles Treaty imposed by German Imperialism's conquerors in 1919)
The typical ex-Stalinist tendencies consisted of people who had burned away most that was specifically Stalinist -
though rarely all of it, as your continued insistence that the Stalinist 1978 coup in Afghanistan was a real revolution demonstrates startlingly - and were left only with a substratum of their old politics, the pseudo-democratic concerns typical of the operational politics of the Stalinist parties.
The (real) CPGB were the pioneers of Scottish, Welsh and regional self- government - in fact, curiously, of much of the Blairite's programme on such things. The sort of stuff you come out with, about, for example, Scotland, is the direct continuation of the politics of the organization whose name you are inexplicably proud to claim as your
own and of the Stalinist tradition in which it was rooted! And in which you are, despite everything, still rooted....
RIGHT WING COMMUNISM: A STATE OF ARRESTED POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
If there are differences between you and the real CPGB on these questions, they are only differences of detail.
The important difference I can see is that with you these things are far more the only operational focus. T he old CP had other irons in the fire; and, unfortunately, they did organise in the labour movement.
(And, in justice, while for the Stalinist parties in their prime, talk of democracy, etc., was double-talk and manipulative gobbledygook, in your own way you do seem to be trying to take democracy seriously: but then the typical democratically inclined ex-Stalinists habitually do, and typically wind up as some species of bourgeois democrat...)
Exactly when you ceased to be overt Stalinists, I don't know, but I'll be surprised if it was before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. What you are now is an organization that has to be bracketed, in terms of the history of Stalinism and ex-Stalinist groups, politically with those rightwards evolving ex-Communist groups turning themselves into bourgeois democrats (Which is not necessarily to say that you will eventually become just bourgeois democrats, or that all of you will...)
I have repeatedly said in debates with you - and never received a serious reply - that your concentration on "democratic questions', together with your bigoted neglect of the economic class struggle and the bedrock labour movement, means that for you, your "operational" communism is only a thing of names, symbols and fetishes.
The entire range of your up-front operational politics consists of "democratic" and "national democratic" questions
around which you spin political fantasies - around Scottish nationalism, for example. Politically, you are on the far
right of any "communist" spectrum. I made this appraisal of the CPGB /WW in a debate with John-Jack. and I can't
recall that anything he said jn response made me think I am mistaken...
You remain subjectively revolutionary, but in your operational politics, as I said above, you stand curiously close to the right wing of the old (that is, the real) CPGB. who, of course, were not as you are subjectively revolutionaries and communists, but, at the end, bourgeois democrats.
The point is that, so too are you - if you are to be characterized by your "operational" political concerns, as distinct from what you say of yourselves, and your, so to speak, reserve "Communist" politics. The essential difference is a subjective, not a political, one. It is a matter of symbols like the hammer and sickle, words
like "Communist", feelings, nostalgias , shibboleths - and names:the C P G B!
A political tendency can not subsist for long on such a basis. The contradiction between what you are subjectively and what you are in objective political terms, will resolve itself, one way or the other..
Because of your fetishistic approach you elevate even things of tenth-rate importance, such as the hammer and sickle, fealty to which you passionately defended in one of our minuted discussions, into things of the first importance, as essentials of "communism". You think that names, symbols, fetishes and mantras magically makes your operational "democratic" politics into "Communism".
Secure in the possession of your icons and fetishes you feel you can neglect the lab our movement and the working class, and, spitting Lenin-fortified curses about "economists" and "amateurs" contemptuously over your shoulder, still think yourselves "Leninists" and "communists". "Communism"? It is you!
One consequence is that your idea of the "revolutionary party" has been allowed to shrink down until you are left with the conception of the revolutionary party as, in essence, an a-historical fetish: no more than the bearer of anointed symbolic things.
For Marxists, the measure of whether an organization is communist, is not what it says it is, but what it is in practice; its real programme is not only stuff written down somewhere, but the sum total of what it is and does.
You are communists in Lenin's sense, if you do the work of communists. If not, not. We have to win the socialist
future. Nothing is predetermined or preordained. Faith and works; theory and practice! James Connolly said it best: the only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce! Mark, the "operational politics" of the CPGB /WW , not to speak of your fetishistic conceptions, etc., will never build a serious Leninist organisation.
THE OLD CPs HAD A GRUESOME POLITICAL COHERENCE WHICH YOU ENTIRELY LACK
There is a radical, a fundamental, difference - other than your size - between an old CP with roughly similar democratic operational politics and the CPGB/WW. Those C Ps could play manipulative games with "democratic demands', and still think they were thereby promoting "socialism". Such concerns as National independence, etc, helped them in their primary work of backing USSR foreign policy and work to rouse the people in the bourgeois-democratic states against the USSR's main enemy, the USA. (And, of course, it helped some of them, in countries like Yugoslavia and China, to come to power as national saviours at the head of non-proletarian forces)
An old Stalinist Party could focus on "Democratic Questions" secure in the knowledge that the "socialist dimension" of things was simultaneously being taken care of. The "Soviet Union" was building socialism. Eventually, somehow, that would lead to socialism in Britain, or wherever. Someone else was "looking after" the "socialist side of things". The example of the "Soviet Union" would eventually win world socialism
There was a grotesque - though of course delusory - coherence to it
And you? You continue the "democratic-demands-up-front" tradition, but without being able to believe that others are looking after the :socialist side of things You entirely lack the, sort-of, coherence your mentors thought they had.. "Democracy"-up-front politics coupled with "The USSR is leading the world to socialism", is one thing. Your democracy-up-front politics coupled with a few tawdry "communist" shibboleths - that is something else again.). It is one measure of how preposterous it is for people who do only what you do, to name themselves "communists.
SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY
"Democracy" is what the long-time core members of the CPGB WW formation are left with from your history, a pretty typical history of would-be-revolutionaries trying to reorient, without having fully emancipated themselves from the Stalinist tradition
For the individuals who have joined the ex-Stalinist nucleus, the narrow focus on "democracy" means as many different things as there are individuals. The point is that "democracy" cannot be the prime definition of a communist current.
Democratic questions are of course a central part of our politics - "consistent democracy" to my mind can be a useful synonym for socialism. We raised the question of defending and extending democracy 20 and 25 years ago. We raised it in the big struggles of the early 80s (see the files of Socialist Organiser and the WL pamphlet on democracy, consisting in part of articles I wrote at the beginning of 1982.)
There is, in my opinion, scope for campaigning in Britain now around the democratic issues raised by the accelerated bureaucratization of bourgeois politics. In his "Action Programme For France", written in 1934, Trotsky showed how such issues of democracy can and should be raised within bourgeois society, at that time in France, by communists who thought that the struggle for power was very near. We were guided by it when we raised questions like the undemocratic character of the Thatcher government, in the early 1980s (have a look at it).
But even though AWL and CPGB/ WW agree in general that the defense and expansion of democracy within bourgeois society is important now, we parted company on what it means .With such nonsense as - on Scotland your conjuring up of "communist" fantasies around variations on what the Blairites were actually doing! - you managed to parody oldstyle Stalinism!
A "VARIEGATED COLLECTION OF INDIVIDUALS" IS NOT A LENINIST PARTY!
Your organization fits the description which the comrades of Lutte Ouvriere once justly used to describe the "pre-
Leninist" (pre-1968) IS/SWP. - "a variegated collection of individuals" - a collection of politically very different
individuals from all over the spectrum of the left, within which a small core group who have evolved from a once hard-nosed Stalinism, hold sway.
A strange hybrid political formation: in sentiment revolutionary, rightist in operational politics; in politics poor, rich insymbols, fetishes and mantras! In political terms you have traveled a great distance from your starting point. It is, I think improbable that you have stopped travelling and have reached equilibrium
One of the most curious relics of this history is your organization's preposterous attempt to argue that the old CPGB heritage is something revolutionaries can defend and should lay claim to. Heroically - stakhanovistically! - fetishistic, long after the real CPGB collapsed with a stench, you devotedly maintain "The CP GB" (but it is a sort of " Wizard Of Oz CPGB": - nothing, as little Dorothy discovered, behind the facade!)
I don't know enough of your history to form more than a general opinion of precisely what your trajectory is, but I
doubt that the "variegated collection of individuals" coalescing in the CPGB/WW around "democracy" and a few
fetish-objects of Stalinist "communism , can travel the same road for long. The fact that you are, as far as I can see, sincere about "democracy" is one reason why the hard core CPGB/WWs should not be regarded as politically stable. It is also the reason why we can hope that you, or some of you, can be won to the consistent Marxism of AWL
On a certain level, I think you know that as well as I do, and are correspondingly wary of "difficult" questions like
Afghanistan. We'll see...
CONCLUSION
Despite all this, Mark, I do not conclude that the CPGB/WW is useless or that we should give up on trying to win you, or some of you, to comprehensively revolutionary Marxist politics! Despite the deficiencies I discuss above, you are, subjectively, communists; you want to be Leninists. That makes all sorts of things possible
I still think that not only a joint paper but, in a favourable evolution, a common organization between AWL and
CPGB/WW would be possible, if we had plausible agreement on certain conditions: fundamentally, if we could
establish and maintain a regime of open and honest political discussion; if we could agree on joint involvement in the class struggle; if we could establish and maintain as our common method in a joint organisation, honest political accounting and honest dealing.
My conclusion is that we should resume the close-engagement discussions. I think that if we don't do that we will find the distance between us growing, not lessening. Your silly, but also malevolent, gossip-column stuff on AWL in WW, is an indication of it
And yes, we should discuss Afghanistan, and soon. In the question of the Afghan coup and Russia's colonial war in Afghanistan, nothing less is involved for you than whether or not you are to complete your break with Stalinism and consolidate as a genuine revolutionary socialist tendency (what we would call a Trotskyist tendency; small 't'
Trotskyism, if you insist).
A political tendency that has understood that no serious, non-schizoid, people can pursue revolutionary working class politics in the 21st Century and still go on claiming as their political lineage and tradition the rag, tag and bobtail of Stalinist organizations in the line of which you claim to stand. (And, unfortunately, do, to an often debilitating extent, still stand.)
There is no extant revolutionary tradition on which a mass democratic working class communist movement can be
rebuild except that of those who broke with and fought the Stalinist bureaucracy from the start, in the 1920s - the tradition of Trotsky 's Left Opposition.
That is what gives the question of Afghanistan its importance for you, and for us in relating to you.
Regards,
Sean Matgamna.