Workers' Liberty

By Sean Matgamna
Introduction
Watching the accelerating political and moral degeneration of the Stalinised “Communist International" in the mid-1930s, Leon Trotsky entitled one of his commentaries “Is There No End To The Fall?" Had he been forced to observe the contemporary “revolutionary left" during the Balkans war of April-May 1999 he might have addressed the same incredulous and bitter question to a large proportion of those who name themselves “Trotskyists".

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” — Vladimir Lenin

According to the classic account by Lewis H Morgan, “barbarism” is in human history the stage between savagery and civilisation; between the stage of “savage” peoples who are hunters and casual gatherers on one side, and on the other “civilised” people who have developed cities.

Paul Hampton Reviews "Cuba: Socialism and Democracy" by Peter Taaffe
This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly-Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP)

The anti-capitalist movement exploded onto the world political scene in Seattle two years ago.

This article argues that a renewed socialism for the 21st century will be based on independent working class politics. It uses the “Third Camp” as a formula for summing up this essential element for Marxist history and for current intervention in the class struggle. China represents a fertile example in both these respects.

The development of industrial society threw masses of women into the factories. Whole industries, like the cotton industry, had a majority of women and children workers, existing in terrible conditions of super exploitation; as Marx put it in Capital, “Robbed of all that had previously been considered necessary for life".(1)

After Lenin: the revival and reinterpretation

The revival of defeatism did not take place while Lenin was alive, that is, during the first five years of the Comintern... A check of the resolutions and theses, major documents, and publications of the Comintern permits the confident statement: if anyone referred to defeatism at all, it certainly played no role in the programme, policy and principles of the Communist International under Lenin.

“When Vladimir Ilyitch once observed me glancing through a collection of his articles written in the year 1903, which had just been published, a sly smile crossed his face, and he remarked with a laugh: ‘It is very interesting to read what stupid fellows we were!”’

VII
Caliban: Then the “banker turned politician Milosevic stepped in to divert the anger away from the government by whipping up hatred against Albanians living in Serb-run Kosovo… Milosevic put forward a simple answer to the economic crisis brought about by the madness of the market — blame the Albanians.”

I
WHAT the “self-conceit” of the Apparatus Marxists “accomplished” during the Balkan war was to put their “Marxism” to the task of apologising for and making propaganda on behalf of Serbian imperialism attempting genocide in its colony Kosova.

What attitude should be taken towards
the Communist Parties ?

Cliff’s final prong was that bureaucratic collectivism disorientated revolutionaries in their dealings with Stalinist Communist Parties, especially those in the West after the war. This did not appear in the original article — it is grafted onto the revised version. Shachtman had written:

Looking at your website article on Israel, I think you write off too easily the idea of a democratic secular state to solve the problem of Israel and the Palestinians. You consider it either as a utopian scheme or as a call for the military demolition of Israel by the neighbouring Arab states. Either way it is not an option, and you call for a two-state solution, an Israeli state next to a Palestinian one.

Esther Leslie’s article on Walter Benjamin (‘Tragedy, Progress and Struggle’ WL66) is welcome and I hope, along with her, that his work can be rescued from the academics who have done him to death in recent the years. There are, however, a number of problems with Benjamin’s work, some of them quite fundamental, that Esther Leslie’s article doesn’t touch on. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to read her book yet, so if any of the points I now raise are discussed there then I offer my apologies in advance.

East Timor was discussed at a September meeting of the National Committee of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. It was noted that there were discussions on troops in WL Australia. The minutes then state: “Doubt there will be disagreement on UN troops here [Britain] — after Kosova debates: don’t call for peacekeeping troops; don’t necessarily denounce them. The implication was clear — we shouldn’t have had a problem in Australia — the British debates on Kosova had already sorted out the issues.

I don’t disagree with what Chris Reynolds says about progress (‘New forces and passions’ WL63) but I think it is one-sided, in two respects.

Firstly there are, I think, two distinct notions in Lenin about the progressive or reactionary character of “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”. One is the notion of “moribund” capitalism — that is, the idea that capitalism has exhausted its capacity to develop the forces of production (forced to adopt collectivist forms like monopoly, etc.). Chris rightly argues that if this were so the 20th century would be inexplicable. Capitalism continues to this day to do “progressive” work: developing production, innovation, and so on. Moreover, I would add that it would be impossible to function in the world without some notion of progress in human affairs.

Some time in the late 80s various fragments of the Healy/Lambert tradition of catastrophist Trotskyism met in all seriousness in Paris for a conference on the theme “Have the productive forces grown since the War?” Chris Reynolds is correct to reject this kind of dogmatism, which flies in the face of reality and by which capitalism has been in an epoch of continuous decline since 1914. He is also correct to reject attempts to maintain the notion of decline by redefining the term and to insist on an analysis that starts from capitalism as it is rather than from our hopes of its collapse or the recitation of past classic texts.

Stalinism and capitalism in the 20th century, according to Susan Buck-Morrs, were driven by parallel “dreamworlds”. “Stalin’s First and Second Five Year Plans amounted to the largest technological transfer in Western capitalist history... [Most] design and layout [of new factories]... was American, probably one-half of the equipment installed was German. Of this, a large amount was manufactured in Germany to American design on Soviet account. In quantity, American-built equipment was probably second and British third...”

Marx noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that the bourgeois crisis of mid-nineteenth-century France was resolved in the cry: “Rather an end with terror than terror without end.” Stalinism was an end with terror, as a new book of light commentary and heavy reproduction of documents confirms.

The bulk of this volume is an examination of the economic talks between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR in 1939-41, while Stalin remained “neutral” and Hitler was at war with the West. They ended with the German attack on the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. As Ericson puts it, “Nazi Germany turned to bite the hand that had fed it for the past twenty-two months.”

In 1610, Galileo Galilei, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “abolished Heaven” — by proving the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that the Church’s entire theory of the cosmos, based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, was false. By pointing his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he proved the celestial spheres were not immutable. Some Church astronomers refused to look. Eventually he was accused of heresy.

Alas, Poor Darwin, assembling articles from biologists, sociologists and others, takes exception to the excessive claims of evolutionary theory (EP) — the theory that human behaviour must be understood in terms of adaptations caused by natural selection (so that we are, basically, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers).

Toni Negri was the most celebrated intellectual of Italy’s “ultra-left” in the 1970s. He was jailed in 1979 for “armed insurrection against the powers of the State”; won freedom in 1983 by getting elected to Parliament; fled to France in 1983; and has been back in jail, in Italy, since 1997.

Those who cry against a European single currency, that it would mark a fundamental “surrender” of British sovereignty, are correct. It would. A single currency will be a giant step in the direction of European unity and a decisive move towards the creation of a European state. Europe has already achieved an irreversible though uneven and incomplete level of economic integration and unity. “Europe” already determines much of what happens within the member states of the European Union. The question is not whether there will be a united Europe, but, what sort of European unity?

The Socialist Alliance in the June 2001 General Election gave voters in 98 constituencies the chance to vote for "socialism" and against New Labour. On average, 1.62% of the people who voted in each constituency did so.

In France, unlike Britain, municipal elections attract as much interest as national polls. In the municipal elections of 11 and 18 March 2001, there was a higher turnout (66% at the second round) than in Britain’s general election of June 2001; and the revolutionary left scored impressively. Lutte Ouvrière (LO) averaged 4.37% over 128 municipalities, and elected 33 municipal councillors. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), standing in a variety of lists under titles like “100% on the left”, got 36 municipal councillors, and those lists, 91 of them, averaged 4.52%. There were 175 municipalities in total where far-left lists of candidates were presented — 44 of them have both LO and LCR-supported lists — covering about 18% of the electorate.

“Sometimes differentiation is essential if a revolutionary organisation is to survive in an unfavourable political environment... In the 1980s... the SWP [took] refuge in the Marxist tradition as protection against the right-wing climate in society” (Alex Callinicos SWP internal document).

The movie Amadeus sees the precocious Mozart through the eyes of his rival, Salieri. For their first proper meeting, when Mozart arrives at the Court, Salieri has composed a little piece of music. Mozart thanks him, plays back the thing from memory, and then, having commented that a particular chord change “doesn’t really work”, proceeds to improvise on the theme, vastly improving Salieri’s original. Salieri turns to the audience and tells us: “I think it was then that I first decided to kill him.”