The Weekly Worker and 'Openness'
The following reply was sent to the CPGB/Weekly Worker on Sunday, 9th July. It was sent in reply to an article in last weeks issue of that publication, which was a full-page attack on myself. Since then the editor of WW, Peter Manson, has written to me justifying his refusal to publish my response to this substantial attack on the grounds that my reply allegedly contains 'lies'. Readers can judge from the material contained within whether the views expressed in my writings are 'lies', or whether the CPGB has simply lost the ability to deal with political criticism in a political manner. Watch this space - I shall shortly be publishing their justification in full for refusing to publish.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Communism versus centrism
Mike McNair’s response to my recent letter on the Scottish Socialist Party is an indication of a real brittleness in the politics of the CPGB. Originally, the WW collective refused to print it, but since it was circulated widely anyway and obviously made some important points against their ‘intervention’ in the SSP, they were embarrassed into a volte-face. Hence Mike got the job of composing some sort of political response.
Mike claims that the CPGB refused to publish my letter because it contains ‘lies’. But he does not specify what they actually are. The reason for this is simple – there are none. Indeed, if there were demonstrably false statements in it, that would be a very good argument for publishing it – factually false statements are easily discredited with their authors, and it would be in the CPGB leadership’s own interests to do so. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But unfortunately for them they can’t.
What they actually object to is not ‘lies’, but to my interpretation of their own actions, of capitulating to reactionary witchhunts against the left. This is despite all their claims to be for “openness”, and “full and free debate”, and even “the right to be offensive”. But these “rights” do not extend to the right to politically nail Jack Conrad and his followers, and to openly argue a critique of their political record that they find offensive but cannot refute. But every time they break their own professed principles (of open debate) etc, they bang another nail into the political coffin of their own ideological project.
And for all their claims of building a ‘non-ideological’ party, in fact their whole ‘partyist’ project is subordinate to Jack Conrad’s third-campist ideological agenda. If that agenda, and its requirements for alliances such as the mooted one with Hillel Ticktin, for instance, comes into conflict with the partyist project, then it is the ‘party’ project that suffers. As it did two years ago, when the PCC introduced pre-emptive censorship into the CPGB’s own internal discussion list to prevent anti-imperialists like myself from being too harshly critical of and ‘offensive’ to some of the more virulent Galloway-haters and ‘left’ Islamophobes in the CPGB at that time.
The political thrust of Mike McNair’s critique of my letter is chemically pure centrism, and not very left-wing centrism at that. An attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – and a pathetic, liberal like plea for unity on the ‘left’ despite fundamental programmatic differences that amount to the difference between revolution and counterrevolution. And that is the definition of centrism – revolutionary in words - in deeds giving alibis for counterrevolution.
Mike writes: “Ian charges that the CPGB and Weekly Worker ‘don’t know where the class line lies’. It is a charge familiar to us from SWP comrades. But it is one that has come equally from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - who charge that we are scabbing by supporting Galloway by participating in Respect and calling for a vote for Galloway for MP, while SWP comrades (and Ian) charge that we are scabbing by criticising him.”
This is pathetic liberal-centrist moralism. In some ways it resembles those who say that the far left are no better than the far right because both sometimes transcend bourgeois legality and use force to achieve political aims. In this case, Mike makes an equation between pro-imperialist ‘socialists’ like the AWL, who ‘critically’ support the imperialist occupation of Iraq, and those who militantly oppose imperialism and support armed resistance to its depredations – in the best tradition of communism. We are ‘both the same’ because we are both nasty to conciliators like him for not supporting our respective counterposed class positions. Oh dear! But then people who persist in trying to occupy a ‘middle of the road’ position do tend to get run over.
The Alliance for Workers Liberty has a formally similar ethos to the CPGB. It has an internal regime that allows public disagreement with majority positions, and has a record of publishing the details of its internal debates. So it is something of a mystery why Mike makes an equation between the actions of the AWL, in denouncing people of his ilk for various ‘crimes’ from their point of view, as equivalent to the internal regime in the SWP, where public factional dissention is forbidden and internal factionalism is strictly regulated. Indeed, such an equation does not make sense even in terms of formal logic. But logic is not exactly Mike’s strong suit in this debate – he is in fact making a heart-felt plea for conciliation and unity in action between the political currents like by the AWL on the one hand, and people like myself (and the SWP) on the other.
That is not possible – for very good political reasons. The AWL may still have formally the trappings of a far-left organisation. But its fundamental politics do not correspond to this at all. It is part of a broader political milieu – the self-described ‘decent left’, more accurately called the pro-war/pro-imperialist left, as epitomised by such people as Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm and Christopher Hitchens.
The real political centre of gravity of the AWL’s world is the Euston Manifesto group, who today represent something like the authors of the 1980 Limehouse Declaration only on a much smaller scale than the proto-SDP – history repeating itself as farce, as it were. They are the most consistent exponents of the AWL’s kind of views – this pathetic clique of warmongering, anti-Muslim ‘socialists’ – even if the AWL has not yet had the courage of its reactionary convictions and has so far shied away from burning its bridges completely with the far left by signing the Manifesto itself. I confidently predict further reconciliation between these reactionary currents in the future.
What Mike is doing in the passage quoted above is lamenting being shot by both sides in a conflict over fundamental questions involving imperialist war, and the response of socialists to it. No doubt if Mike were around during the World War One he would be lamenting the splitting activities of people like Karl Liebknecht who, after some hesitation, broke the unity in action of the SPD by voting against war credits.
Presumably they should have confined themselves to ‘ideological’ disagreement and continued to abide by ‘unity in action’. But such conflicts cannot be reconciled – their logic in those days was played out with the murder of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the social-imperialist SPD leadership. And when the AWL ‘facetiously’ write that “Perhaps the assassination of Galloway would be justified? … Galloway covered up for and justified the butchery of Saddam Hussein’s regime for almost a decade.” (Solidarity , June 1), what precedents does that evoke?
This is entirely separate, by the way, from the debate over the nature of a revolutionary party and the correct place to draw the line over public and factional disagreement on secondary programmatic and ideological questions. Mike’s ridiculous Spart- and Trot-baiting here completely misfires and is simply a diversion from the issues in dispute. I differ with the SWP over the concept of the revolutionary party – in fact this is why I would prefer to see Respect itself evolve eventually into a mass working class party based on free and open discussion and unity in action – with the SWP broadening its approach to become the main revolutionary trend within this. But there can be no broad ‘unity in action’ with people who support or go along with reactionary witchhunts, or support imperialist occupations. That is not my concept of unity in action at all. These are not secondary differences among communists, but fundamental differences that put us on different sides of the barricades. Such ‘unity’ has a reactionary content, and the centrist political conception behind it must be defeated.
Ian Donovan
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Communism versus centrism
Mike McNair’s response to my recent letter on the Scottish Socialist Party is an indication of a real brittleness in the politics of the CPGB. Originally, the WW collective refused to print it, but since it was circulated widely anyway and obviously made some important points against their ‘intervention’ in the SSP, they were embarrassed into a volte-face. Hence Mike got the job of composing some sort of political response.
Mike claims that the CPGB refused to publish my letter because it contains ‘lies’. But he does not specify what they actually are. The reason for this is simple – there are none. Indeed, if there were demonstrably false statements in it, that would be a very good argument for publishing it – factually false statements are easily discredited with their authors, and it would be in the CPGB leadership’s own interests to do so. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But unfortunately for them they can’t.
What they actually object to is not ‘lies’, but to my interpretation of their own actions, of capitulating to reactionary witchhunts against the left. This is despite all their claims to be for “openness”, and “full and free debate”, and even “the right to be offensive”. But these “rights” do not extend to the right to politically nail Jack Conrad and his followers, and to openly argue a critique of their political record that they find offensive but cannot refute. But every time they break their own professed principles (of open debate) etc, they bang another nail into the political coffin of their own ideological project.
And for all their claims of building a ‘non-ideological’ party, in fact their whole ‘partyist’ project is subordinate to Jack Conrad’s third-campist ideological agenda. If that agenda, and its requirements for alliances such as the mooted one with Hillel Ticktin, for instance, comes into conflict with the partyist project, then it is the ‘party’ project that suffers. As it did two years ago, when the PCC introduced pre-emptive censorship into the CPGB’s own internal discussion list to prevent anti-imperialists like myself from being too harshly critical of and ‘offensive’ to some of the more virulent Galloway-haters and ‘left’ Islamophobes in the CPGB at that time.
The political thrust of Mike McNair’s critique of my letter is chemically pure centrism, and not very left-wing centrism at that. An attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – and a pathetic, liberal like plea for unity on the ‘left’ despite fundamental programmatic differences that amount to the difference between revolution and counterrevolution. And that is the definition of centrism – revolutionary in words - in deeds giving alibis for counterrevolution.
Mike writes: “Ian charges that the CPGB and Weekly Worker ‘don’t know where the class line lies’. It is a charge familiar to us from SWP comrades. But it is one that has come equally from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - who charge that we are scabbing by supporting Galloway by participating in Respect and calling for a vote for Galloway for MP, while SWP comrades (and Ian) charge that we are scabbing by criticising him.”
This is pathetic liberal-centrist moralism. In some ways it resembles those who say that the far left are no better than the far right because both sometimes transcend bourgeois legality and use force to achieve political aims. In this case, Mike makes an equation between pro-imperialist ‘socialists’ like the AWL, who ‘critically’ support the imperialist occupation of Iraq, and those who militantly oppose imperialism and support armed resistance to its depredations – in the best tradition of communism. We are ‘both the same’ because we are both nasty to conciliators like him for not supporting our respective counterposed class positions. Oh dear! But then people who persist in trying to occupy a ‘middle of the road’ position do tend to get run over.
The Alliance for Workers Liberty has a formally similar ethos to the CPGB. It has an internal regime that allows public disagreement with majority positions, and has a record of publishing the details of its internal debates. So it is something of a mystery why Mike makes an equation between the actions of the AWL, in denouncing people of his ilk for various ‘crimes’ from their point of view, as equivalent to the internal regime in the SWP, where public factional dissention is forbidden and internal factionalism is strictly regulated. Indeed, such an equation does not make sense even in terms of formal logic. But logic is not exactly Mike’s strong suit in this debate – he is in fact making a heart-felt plea for conciliation and unity in action between the political currents like by the AWL on the one hand, and people like myself (and the SWP) on the other.
That is not possible – for very good political reasons. The AWL may still have formally the trappings of a far-left organisation. But its fundamental politics do not correspond to this at all. It is part of a broader political milieu – the self-described ‘decent left’, more accurately called the pro-war/pro-imperialist left, as epitomised by such people as Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm and Christopher Hitchens.
The real political centre of gravity of the AWL’s world is the Euston Manifesto group, who today represent something like the authors of the 1980 Limehouse Declaration only on a much smaller scale than the proto-SDP – history repeating itself as farce, as it were. They are the most consistent exponents of the AWL’s kind of views – this pathetic clique of warmongering, anti-Muslim ‘socialists’ – even if the AWL has not yet had the courage of its reactionary convictions and has so far shied away from burning its bridges completely with the far left by signing the Manifesto itself. I confidently predict further reconciliation between these reactionary currents in the future.
What Mike is doing in the passage quoted above is lamenting being shot by both sides in a conflict over fundamental questions involving imperialist war, and the response of socialists to it. No doubt if Mike were around during the World War One he would be lamenting the splitting activities of people like Karl Liebknecht who, after some hesitation, broke the unity in action of the SPD by voting against war credits.
Presumably they should have confined themselves to ‘ideological’ disagreement and continued to abide by ‘unity in action’. But such conflicts cannot be reconciled – their logic in those days was played out with the murder of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by the social-imperialist SPD leadership. And when the AWL ‘facetiously’ write that “Perhaps the assassination of Galloway would be justified? … Galloway covered up for and justified the butchery of Saddam Hussein’s regime for almost a decade.” (Solidarity , June 1), what precedents does that evoke?
This is entirely separate, by the way, from the debate over the nature of a revolutionary party and the correct place to draw the line over public and factional disagreement on secondary programmatic and ideological questions. Mike’s ridiculous Spart- and Trot-baiting here completely misfires and is simply a diversion from the issues in dispute. I differ with the SWP over the concept of the revolutionary party – in fact this is why I would prefer to see Respect itself evolve eventually into a mass working class party based on free and open discussion and unity in action – with the SWP broadening its approach to become the main revolutionary trend within this. But there can be no broad ‘unity in action’ with people who support or go along with reactionary witchhunts, or support imperialist occupations. That is not my concept of unity in action at all. These are not secondary differences among communists, but fundamental differences that put us on different sides of the barricades. Such ‘unity’ has a reactionary content, and the centrist political conception behind it must be defeated.
Ian Donovan
posted by Ian @ 12:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home