Letters

Dictatorship

Tony Clark once again has a go at Marx for talking about ‘dictatorship’: “Karl Marx didn’t do the communist movement any favours by describing working class rule as a dictatorship,” he writes (Letters, December 1). He adds: “The first thing communist intellectuals must do is to recognise Marx’s mistake on this question and stop describing working class rule and socialism as a dictatorship.”

He doesn’t seem to realise that, when Marx talked about the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, he was referring to the current social order, whereby the rule of capital is imposed on us all in everyday life simply because of capitalist production. Similarly the ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat will impose our own - democratic - control over production, at the expense of the capitalist profiteers.

Clark says he is also for “democratic socialism”, though he doesn’t tell us what this is. What form will it take? How will we get there? Does it mean victory for the working class being achieved through Labour or some other party in parliament? Perhaps we need to wait for Sir Keir to get rid of the House of Lords for us (though what about the monarchy?).

The capitalist dictatorship owns the Lords and almost all of the Commons, though they are, as we know, even cheaper than their US counterparts. They all pledge allegiance to the monarch - as do the armed forces and the police. Is the working class supposed to win an election and then put forward a motion in the house to, for instance, renationalise the NHS?

After due debate between MPs hopping up and down to get the eye of the speaker, it could then go to the ‘upper house’ (though this may not be necessary, thanks to Sir Keir) and then to the monarch. After several months of this, as we work our way through the CPGB’s Draft programme item by item, the laws are passed (hurrah!) in a suitably ‘democratic socialist’ manner. In reality, the working class will see the communists as just the same as the democratic socialists of old, while the capitalist dictatorship waits for the moment to round up and shoot the upstarts.

Near the end of the letter we read about the need to “stop giving the opponents of communism a stick to beat us over the heads with”. As if they had any shortage of those. Joe Biden has been berated as a ‘communist’, so I think it would be difficult to hide our heads in any meaningful way.

We need a mass Communist Party to lead the working class. With that we wouldn’t be worrying about being called ‘dictators’. Sticks and stones, comrade, but words will never hurt us.

Jim Nelson
email

Corruption

We are being told that Rishi Sunak will bring in “tough new anti-strike laws” - and that he is “shocked” by the lobbying allegations against Michelle Mone (that could come from the famous Casablanca line: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”).

But the two issues are unavoidably linked. New anti-strike laws will be, like their predecessors, procured by corruption: the bribes paid in the form of payments to private lobbyists; the amplification of pro-employer speech, drowning out opposed speech, by the advertising funding of the mass media; the ‘free market in legal services’, which amounts to the sale and denial of justice in violation of Magna Carta chapter 29. These forms of corruption are legal; but they are still just as much corruption as the direct payment of bribes to officials.

The new proposed laws, and the lobbying/cronyism stories (the allegations against Mone are by no means unique) are two sides of the same coin. Pushing the masses down, not levelling up. Anti-union laws - and the deployment of the security apparat to suppress dissent in the Labour Party, as has been going on since Corbyn was elected as Labour leader (and still continues following his fall) - create the conditions in which corruption and cronyism is the inevitable form of government.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

It’s class, stupid

More media attention has been given to the appalling conditions in Haiti this week. How much is correct and how much is hype is anybody’s guess, but it appears that even a cynic can see that something is wrong, and has been wrong, for a long time in Haiti.

In an article in Counterpunch on November 22, professor Philippe-Richard Marius of the City College of New York calls on those who are watching the situation in Haiti grow more and more fragile to understand the situation for what it is. He makes a claim that will not be a mystery to readers of the Weekly Worker, but seems to elude those who do not understand the forces of history. The claim is that the understanding of what is happening to Haiti requires a class-based, not ‘race first’, approach.

In an interview with David Falcone, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marius argues that Haiti is first and foremost a bourgeois society. Not that racism, and specifically anti-black racism, doesn’t play a large part in the reproduction of privilege in the country. Some of the media portray the struggles in Haiti as being colour vs colour - as, for example, mulattoes not being ‘actually’ black and therefore being privileged.

He argues: “Privileged blacks may very well experience racism and colorism of privileged people within their class - all the while they may very well be highlighting the blackness of the oppressed who look like them in the lower classes.”

He points out that after the revolution, while the white supremacy and the institution of slavery were destroyed, the victors were colonial natives of African descent, including former slavemasters as well as former slaves. Many of those were owners of plantations. And what did they do with this new power? They reproduced French practices and ideologies which created a deeply unequal early capitalist society, now bequeathed to the contemporary nation.

The Haitian elites have attempted to convince the world that their black republic was and is a beacon of freedom in a sea of racism and colonialism. At the same time, in their founding papers, citizenship was prohibited to African-born former slaves, many of whom had also fought against the French. Other contradictions ensued until, for example, now Haiti has a French-speaking, bilingual minority (professor Marius says that 5% of Haitians speak French), while the majority of the population are oppressed, monolingual speakers of Haitian Creole.

An instructive part of Haitian history that Marius points out is that a statue, supposedly a national icon, was installed called ‘Le Marron Inconnu’ (‘Unknown Maroon’ - maroons were those who fled to the mountains and remained free from slavery.) This was to give the impression of maroons as the evocation of the ‘unknown soldier’, fighting valiantly for their national freedom and racial equality.

So far so good, as far as it goes. However, another historian reminds us that the longest-lasting maroon community in Saint-Domingue (the old name for Haiti) consisted of practising Christians, who signed a treaty with the French. In this treaty they received the right to leave the mountains, in return for which they agreed to assist the colonialists in capturing and returning runaway slaves.

The black elite is as able to establish their own historical narrative as any other elite, contradictions notwithstanding. And who do we think will benefit when/if western countries decide to invade in order to make Haiti ‘safe’?

To paraphrase a well-known politician, ‘Three words: it’s class, class and class.’

Gaby Rubin
London

Next election

Proposed parliamentary boundary changes would translate the present opinion poll results into a hung parliament.

Labour already expresses no hope of retaining Islington North against Jeremy Corbyn. Its candidate will be lucky to be placed fourth, although if Corbyn really were a friend of Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA, then there would be no such candidate. No-one would dare - would you?

As a Commonwealth citizen who is not serving a term of imprisonment either in the United Kingdom or in the Republic of Ireland, Julian Assange is eligible to contest an election to the British House of Commons from anywhere in the world. He should therefore do so against Keir Starmer.

And there is talk of bringing back David Miliband. If he is remembered at all in Britain, then it is as a joke, with his banana. But he was perpetrating great evil behind that. He would need to be opposed by one of the two remaining active politicians who were most associated with opposition to extraordinary rendition and with support for the cause of the Chagos Islands.

One of those is Corbyn. The other removed Roy Jenkins from the Commons, and Miliband is no Jenkins. Step forward, George Galloway!

David Lindsay
Durham

Veganuary

I appreciate that this will seem a bit left of field, but I would like to encourage all readers to try a month of being vegan this January (known as ‘Veganuary’) and see how you get on.

The truth is that there are no humane slaughterhouses. The experience of the animals is awful, which is why they never broadcast it. Likewise the workers doing the slaughtering can only get by through disconnecting from what they are actually doing. A Google search will show you that many are unable to totally disconnect and end up with post-traumatic stress disorder and a whole host of other conditions.

We can fight for a world in which neither humans nor animals have to be exploited.

Tom Taylor
Plymouth

Discipline

I found Mike Macnair’s discussion, which included the propensity of Trotskyist groups to fragment to an absurd degree and the role of ‘diplomacy’, really interesting and thought-provoking (‘Principle not diplomacy’ Weekly Worker November 24).

In a useful section on ‘Unity is strength’ he states:

“The history of the ‘new parties of the left’ is yet another demonstration of this very elementary point. By uniting, those on the left have shown themselves able to grow and have an impact well beyond their initial numbers. In contrast, the disunity of the small groups of the far left renders us politically impotent and ineffective. Because it is opposed to the most elementary interests of the working class, and hence to the instincts of the broad layer of trade union activists, etc, disunity opposes the groups to the class which they aim to organise.”

This is profoundly true and in all respects (and as an aside) I think this is the only positive point about the ‘new parties of the left’ I have ever seen in the main part of the Weekly Worker!

I have developed a little theory of some of the reasons why the Trotskyist ‘left’ is so prone to fracturing, splitting and fragmenting. Just as imperialism enabled the creation of a ‘labour aristocracy’ and the fomentation of the ideology of social democracy within the imperialist heartlands, so it creates some form of distorting mirror or something in the air resulting in distorted perceptions of those involved in left politics, where people are often unable to see the genuine big picture and instead think differences over ‘personalities’, wordings, phrasings, nuances, priorities, tactics, histories, feelings, etc are so overwhelmingly important that they justify splitting. These minor differences become so all-consuming that they instil hostility and even hatred between the splitters and the remaining fragments, and they all completely lose sight of the main tasks - which are to work within the working class movement as it really is and help transform it into a “class for itself”.

Part of their problem is in their Trotskyist DNA, inherited from the original factionalist and splitter himself. In truth, Trotsky was never a real Bolshevik in the true and profound sense of that word. He spent years fighting Lenin and the Bolsheviks, only joining them after the February revolution in 1917. His record in the post-revolution Communist Party was hardly glorious. His catastrophic analysis and policy programme of the early 1920s was debated and defeated within the Communist Party as likely leading to the early destruction of the Soviet Union. Instead of continuing to work within the party in a disciplined and collective manner, Trotsky factionalised inside and outside the party, and used unlawful and conspiratorial methods to try and undermine Soviet power and ultimately take power for himself.

It is hardly surprising that Trotskyist groups, which inherited their DNA from their politically promiscuous master, fail so badly to demonstrate genuine Bolshevik principles and values in practice.

Mike is profoundly right when he describes genuine workers’ unity “as a unity consciously constructed - among people who are members of diverse families and from diverse localities and, often enough, national backgrounds - in order to achieve specific goals in the everyday struggle with capital. Real, effective workers’ unity must be unity in diversity: must be accompanied by variety, disagreement and discussion. Otherwise, the unity will break up, whether in splits, or in the attrition of individual members leaving or merely retreating from activity.”

Yes, but it must also be based on responsibility, judgment and discipline. We must discipline ourselves to always remember the big picture, keep in mind what is really important, and take individual and collective responsibility to achieve the maximum possible unity at all times. Sometimes - often indeed - this may mean refraining from picking fights over issues which, tempting though they may be, are far less important than overall unity and achieving the goals of the liberation of the working class. Patience, judgment, discipline and responsibility are important qualities of genuine revolutionaries.

Andrew Northall
Kettering