Workers' Liberty

One has to ask how exactly the CPGB intend to go about driving us from the workers' movement when they themselves make a high principle of not going anywhere near it. (Anyone got a CPGBer in their union branch? Local community campaign? Workplace, even? Nope, thought not.)

It will undoubtedly strike most rational leftists as a bit odd that the CPGB think that the place of people like George Galloway (who they insist on calling "comrade") and other ultra-Stalinists, third-worldists or pro-Islamists in the workers' movement is not to be questioned, but that the AWL is to be driven out. When it comes to the elements that really *should* have no place in the workers' movement (the Blair-Brownite class-collaborationists that run must unions, for example), the CPGB of course has very little to say - because the actual nitty-gritty of class struggle politics are completely alien to them.

And finally, being called a "Stalinophobe" is not something anyone should be offended by. If you live in Sheffield and are afraid of snakes, that's irrational. But if you're a leftist who knows about the history of class struggle - about every revolution the Stalinists smashed or sold out, about every great working-class struggle they undermined through their sell-out politics and anti-democratic methods, about every abject catastrophe they allowed to happen - being more than a bit wary of Stalinism isn't just rational, it's essential.

What sums it up for me is that although they have a handful of members (less than 50?), they call themselves the CPGB.

A bunch of cultish-nutters, trying to disrupt another group with half truths and lies.

They use the CPGB name not because they think they are The Communist Party, but because they are CALLING for a Communist Party. A party that would be far larger than just their particular tendency. The AWL, on the other hand, seems to think it can build a party simply out of its own Shachtmanite tendency (yes, I know, you'll deny it, but your actions speak louder than your words).

And I don't recall Galloway or the SWP leadership -- however awful they may be -- effectively making excuses for an inevitably-catastrophic Israeli attack on Iran. That's what Sean M. has done, however much you all wish to deny it. If you really all want to be Marxists then you are obligated to remove him -- and those who agree with him -- from your organization.

(And it's silly to say that the CPGB don't condemn the union bureaucracy. Of course they do. They've said repeatedly that the union bureaucracy are a key pillar in propping up capitalism. Read any of Mike McNair's articles -- he says this again and again.)

I don't know what "actions" precisely *you're* talking about but I would broadly agree that our actions speak louder than words; I think "actions" like being founder-members of the Socialist Alliance (and defenders of the SA to the last when the SWP succeeded in strangling the organisation) and, more recently (and more importantly in my view) initiating concrete, practically-focused discussions in unions like the RMT about working-class political representation certainly say a lot about how we think a working-class, socialist political party might develop and our conception is certainly not - as you suggest - that the AWL is that party in embryo.

On Galloway and the SWP, your double standards are absolutely jaw-dropping. Galloway not only "made excuses for" but was an outright, explicit supporter of the USSR; a more powerful and barbrous imperialist force than Israel has ever been. But should he be "driven out of the workers' movement" according to the "CPGB"? No. The SWP also "made excuses for" (and arguably worse) the genocidal ethno-imperialist project of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosova, but there was no talk of "driving [the SWP] out of the workers' movement". Galloway and the SWP are also both supporters of the Iranian government, a powerful capitalist force with clear regional imperialist ambitions. Even if you indulge the notion (which I don't for a second) that Sean is an outright supporter of and advocate for either an Israeli attack on Iran or Israeli sub-imperialism in general, why is that somehow a special category? (I actually think it's entirely right not to talk about "driving [the SWP] out of the workers' movement" even though I obviously think their politics are despicable, for reasons I'll explain later.)

OI can see why you like the CPGB so much given your apparent proclivity for Stalinist organisational tactics. Again, even if Sean had openly expressed support for an Israeli attack on Iran (again; he hasn't) the idea that he (and not only he but *everyone who agrees with him*) should be summarily "removed" (your word) from the AWL without a discussion and debate in which those of who disagreed attempted to change our comrades' minds is staggering. Maybe it's just my "Stalinophobia" kicking in again but this seems to me like a clear case of anti-Stalinists (I assume you're from an anti-Stalinist tradition?) being shackled to Stalinist conceptions of organisation and internal culture.

The hysterical, classless "anti-imperialism" that hegemonises the left obscures rational debate. In the build-up to the Iraq war, I knew people who were refugees from Kurdish backgrounds who supported it. These people were leftists; some of them were Marxists, in the periphery of the WCPI. Their view was that while they would not call for a US invasion and were clear about the interests in which it would be carried out, neither could they oppose it because it was (in their eyes) the only immediate means by which space for workers' organisation might be opened up in Iraq. The AWL believed then and still believes that the position of such people was wrong, and we argued against it, but without any suggestion of "removing" or "driving out" such people from the left or the labour movement. Their position was wrong because it implied the possibility of seperating a particular military action from the class interests in which it was carried out (which in my view is part of the reason why I think Sean is wrong about Israel/Iran, as I explain here. It was not, as the CPGB would suggest, a "scab" position that merited their expulsion from the movement. Grappling with the realities of capitalist states that are fascistically hostile to workers' organisation is something Marxists should take very seriously and debate rationally. Hysteria and Stalinoid organisational tactics obscures that. (Again, this analogy is limited as I do not believe Sean's position to be in any way positively pro-war.)

My suspiscion is that you [USRed] and others might respond to this anecdote by saying "ah well; that's different. They're members of an oppressed minority, their material experience might well have led them to have illusions in imperialism or to fetishise opposition to the Ba'athist state above wider anti-imperialist concerns. Sean - an experienced Marxist from the West - should know better." Maybe that's not how you'd respond, but let me head off the criticism anyway; I think that is vulgar and crude determinism which hinges on extreme condescension.

My point here is that in a world where the workers' movement internationally is incredibly weak, frequently marginalised and often incapable of immediately imposing itself on a given situation, people - including good Marxists - can end up turning in desperation to various bourgeois or non-working-class forces that look like they might be able to (yes, in their own way, for their own reasons) create some openings or head off a particular catastrophe (cf. leftists who back UN intervention in Darfur). I think there's a similar process going on in the heads of people who are attracted to the SWP's politics; consistent third-campism seems so remote that backing the only forces who seem immediately capable of standing up to US hegemony (be that the Iranian government, Muqtada al-Sadr or whoever else) appears like the only option available. That's why I *don't* think the SWP and its fellow-travellers should be "driven out of the workers' movement"; I want to counterpose - and I think the AWL does counterpose - through rational debate with such people the alternative of independent working-class politics to both forms of the politics of despair and lesser-evilism.

I'm making these points as generalities - once again, I don't think Sean is guilty of giving any positive support to the military adventures, actual or potential, of any imperialist government. But I think it's necessary for genuine third-campists to recognise that a healthy left (which for us means a third-campist left) can only be built on the basis of rational, comradely debate which acknowledges that it's not always easy to maintain hope.

Finally on the issue of the CPGB and the trade union movement, I didn't say they "don't condemn the ... bureaucracy"; I actually said they have very little to say - which I think is fair; weigh up the amount of articles in their press about intra-left disputes or high theory against articles about the actual workers' movement. Did you notice, USRed, that the postal workers' dispute (one of, if not the, most potentially significant industrial dispute in Britain for two decades) had been live several weeks before the CPGB had anything to say about it?

The CPGB has no orientation to the actually existing labour movement, no strategy for how industrial struggle might be developed, no ideas for how the labour movement might be reinvigorated and reorganised, no suggestions for how workers' organisation could be developed in expanding sectors and no programme in terms of rank-and-file organisation within the unions. Given all of this, saying "the union bureaucracy is a key pillar in propping up capitalism" is nothing more than a Marxist truism.

The CPGB simply aren't serious about class struggle, which is one of the many reasons I find their "criticisms" very difficult to take seriously.

I can't remember exactly, but I think six issues of the Weekly Worker passed before their was any comment on the postal workers' dispute.

Sacha

i'm calling myself 'good looking' because i think i may be so in the future.