Letters

Digital Peronism

In his recent piece on the millennial relaunch of Tribune (‘Tribune of the populists’ September 10), Paul Demarty diagnoses a set of pathologies in the contemporary left broadly in line with analyses I’ve put forward in some recent writings. This offers a welcome occasion to clarify some (dis)agreements, particularly on questions of institution-building.

In Demarty’s sketch, the left - if the loose collage of organisations and subcultures currently grouped under that rubric can count as a unitary force - is cleft by a contradictory condition. Many of its causes enjoy growing popular support, but no corresponding institutional strength exists to translate these causes into concessions from capital. In his (and my) view, such a divergence between popularity and capacity may be explained through the current left’s genetic crippling by the capitalist victories of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2008, the policy consensus of those years has fractured, but the gradient of class power has not tilted, particularly since the new(est) social movements of the 2010s have not forced a reconstitution of the labour movement nor even a coherent leftwing opposition.

Such an uneven revival has encouraged two rival, yet not necessarily irreconcilable, leftwing tendencies (if we omit the usual sectarian bunker mentality). The first is immediatism, or the notion that the new energies spawned by online platforms may be channelled into an insurrectionary assault on the capitalist state - a proposition also favoured by some post-Trotskyite grouplets. As the Weekly Worker has insisted, such proposals are in fact anything but new and mostly an unreflective recycling of older Bakuninite arguments. A second tendency at least recognises the need for reinstitutionalisation, but seeks to personalise it: Laclau’s digital Peronism and its epigones in Podemos and La France Insoumise.

In response, the Weekly Worker has proposed a return to Kautsky’s original pre-World War I centrism and its ‘strategy of patience’, in which institutional agents - cooperatives, unions, parties - can be activated in times of sharpening class tension, but otherwise need to bide their time in the trenches. Such an approach would balance spontaneity and organisation against the Bakuninist or Bonapartist trends in vogue in leftwing circles today.

Its defence of this neo-Kautskyite approach has been strictly conditional, of course, keeping in mind that the man himself ended up an anti-Bolshevik scab, thereby helpfully demonstrating that pleas against impatience can easily slide into constitutional loyalism or reformist accommodation (one need only look at the ‘pillar’ system built up by Belgian socialists in the first half of the 20th century, in which a corporatist secession from the rest of society justified reconciliation and collaboration with the capitalist state; institutionalisation, we see here, is by no means intrinsically revolutionary). Hence Macnair’s recent prolegomena to the question of institutional (party) design.

Yet it would be useful to talk more concretely about existing examples of such a neo-Kautskyite approach - not just in a programmatic sense, as with the DSA’s recent proposal to actualise America’s democratic republic, but also in form. Here, the recent trajectory of the Belgian Workers Party (PTB/PVDA) at least warrants a mention. The PTB is modelled as a Maoist cadre party, which few Weekly Worker readers will take a liking to, including its predictable ‘Marxist-Leninist’ ban on factions, a multi-tiered membership model and record spending numbers on social media. Uniquely among Belgian and European parties, however, the PTB has had measurable success in growing its base in the past years and established ever closer ties with Belgium’s still multitudinous union movement. It sees its parliamentary role as tribunal rather than Millerandist, and has obstructed several governments’ attempts to complete the neoliberal restructuring of Belgian society, long finished in neighbouring countries. For all its pathologies, the party proves that patience pays.

It is historically revealing, of course, that the PTB would be horrified at the idea of being labelled ‘Kautskyite’. Demarty and I both agree that one cannot clone a dinosaur. Yet, as scientists know, genetic manipulation is not impossible either, even if one needs a sense of the material one is working with. As Trotsky himself stated, “does the slogan, ‘Back to Marxism’, mean a leap over the periods of the Second and Third Internationals ... to the First International? But it too broke down in its time. Thus in the last analysis it is a question of returning to the collected works of Marx and Engels. One can accomplish this historic leap without leaving one’s study and even without taking off one’s slippers.”

We need an honest reckoning with the limits of the left’s current reflexes and habits - which are not the cause of, but nonetheless an obstacle to, the recreation of a real labour movement. And there is nothing wrong with dusting off old tools, if they are still fit for purpose. Yet we also need more discussion on the promises and limits of ‘really existing’ left institutionalism, and the uncomfortable trade-offs it often entails.

Anton Jäger
email

Fabricating views

Mike Macnair’s article, ‘New proscriptions for old’ (April 30), gives me a section of my own. I do not recognise myself in Mike’s description, Sadly, he fabricates views to attribute to me, when the real differences are tangible and available to him.

Ukraine is where the piece stops arguing and starts assigning. Macnair writes that I, “along with the Mandelite majority, seek the victory of the US-Nato proxy war in Ukraine (and in order to do so, denies that it is a proxy war, denies that 2014 was a coup, denies that there are far-right elements in the Ukraine government and armed forces)”, and that my politics are therefore those of Max Shachtman in 1965, when he argued for US victory in Vietnam. Four positions attributed inside a single parenthesis, and not one of them quoted, because my article, ‘Flat-pack Leninism’, contains none of them.

Ukraine appears there once, in a passage about editorial method, which charges the Weekly Worker with printing Ukrainian socialist arguments and reaching its existing conclusions anyway. The article is at redmole.org. Macnair is welcome to try to quote a sentence in which I call for a Nato victory. I am, like the Fourth International, for the dissolution of Nato - not for its victory.

On Podemos he has the disagreement upside-down. My objection was never that Podemos permitted tendencies. It was that its leadership permitted them on paper, while making it impossible for them to function, and that this forced the left, our comrades in Anticapitalistas included, into a defensive battle around democratic rights instead of a political offensive against participation in bourgeois governments. The footnote he offers for my supposed anti-Podemos position points to ‘Before Your Party, there was Podemos’. That is Manuel Garí’s essay for the Spanish magazine, Viento Sur, in translation, with an introduction by me. The assessment he ascribes to me is Garí’s, and Garí was in the room at Vistalegre.

Which disposes of the contradiction Macnair thinks he has caught me in, and of the account of my politics as a Mandelism that “ostensibly permits factions (usually called ‘tendencies’), but subject to the continued control of the apparatus”. My piece turns on Trotsky’s distinction between a factional struggle undertaken under compulsion, because a political line requires it, and factionalism as a permanent condition, which he called a scourge. Julia Cámara and Raúl Camargo put the same thing positively in Viento Sur 200 this April: an organisational culture that is fraternal, “fostering freedom of criticism and allowing for the formation of internal factions within a framework of general loyalty”, set against both the cult of personality and the far-left habit of turning revolutionary parties into permanent battlegrounds. I am against apparatus control of factions. That was the argument.

Mike similarly misunderstands or misrepresents Scotland. Anticapitalist Resistance organises in England and Cymru and has never organised in Scotland. The Fourth Internationalist organisation there is Ecosocialist Scotland. No commitment to Scots nationalism is needed to explain an arrangement that is older than the question Macnair puts to it.

The Left Unity reply also misses. Macnair answers about the Socialist Platform and the conduct of its founding meeting in 2013. I wrote about the Communist Platform (declared on February 8 2014 and dissolved on February 20 2016), once its motion had been defeated. Those are different bodies and different years.

The obvious reading of all this is Mike’s carelessness - a polemic written at speed against three targets at once. But Mike isn’t that careless. The Ukraine paragraph is doing work the rest of the section cannot do, which is to convert a disagreement about party regimes into a disagreement about camps, where the answers are already written and no new argument has to be met. And that is exactly the dangerous sloth I referred to in ‘Flat-pack Leninism’.

Duncan Chapel
Red Mole

No limits

In response to Matthew B’s letter (September 10) on my rejection of ‘degrowth communism’, I agree, of course, that we should not dispense with all of the demands raised by degrowthers, such as ending planned obsolescence, sharing and reusing goods, promoting localised production-consumption cycles, and so on.

While Matthew’s scepticism of future technology is perfectly understandable and healthy, I think the suggestion of a definite historical limit to innovation is misplaced. Humans like to innovate - it is not only compelled by the current mode of production. I don’t think we will ever stop innovating, however incrementally. An abundance of free time - the type of abundance Matthew correctly demands more than any other - is in fact likely to lead (as Marx suggested in the Grundrisse) to a greater and greater abundance of experimentation and productivity. (“The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time: ie, time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.”)

If we save the habitability of the planet, then human history has a very long way to go and many innovations of the future surely will be increasingly marvellous (even if we go through some backsliding to start with, due to the collapsing investment and relative cultural conservatism of a dying capitalism, which will likely carry through to the early stages of socialism, while we are building up the capacity to enable the innovations of the future in a way that do not - as with capitalism - threaten extreme unemployment and extreme austerity).

If our ability to innovate is tied to increasingly scarce metals, then the likelihood of communism permanently usurping capitalism seems fanciful, for how would we maintain the automated production that is making capitalism increasingly untenable and obsolete? (If we can rid the world of capitalism and replace it with communism before we have something close to the fully automated production of goods, then why hasn’t that already happened and what else can serve as the catalysing factor?) Sustaining communism would not depend on material capacity, but ‘ideological’ conditioning (which in fact is shaped by material conditions).

“The idea that lack of profitability is the only reason we don’t instead use fibrous plants and lab-grown materials to make [alternatives to mined metals] is dubious at best,” writes Matthew. I do, again, sincerely appreciate the scepticism; however, while I appreciate that the relative lack and difficulty of research and development in alternatives to the status quo is also a major factor, investment rates in R&D have evidently fallen, along with rates of profit. Communism is required to reverse the trend.

The finite amount of metals in the ground will instead compel us to innovate increasingly non-extractively and additively; as will the rising cost of having to dig deeper for lower-quality metals; which will in turn compel us to replace capitalism with communism - enabling the (decades-long) transition from extractive and non-renewable to additive and renewable production.

Ted Reese
London

Baffling garb

Lawrence Parker has, of course, every right to choose how to present himself in these letter columns, but why he cloaks his thoughts in such snooty, pretentious garb is baffling. It took me several reads to understand what he was getting at here last week (Letters, September 10). I make no claim to any degree of Marxist intellectualism, but suggest there must have been others in the world communist movement who frequent this paper thinking … ‘WTF?’

But it wasn’t just the tone of his critique of our culture programme at this year’s Communist University that mystified me. He lambasts our supposed concentration on the musical play or cantata, Die Maßnahme (translated as The measures taken) by Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler that was actually only ever mentioned at CU in a literally two-minute comment by comrade Anne McShane after the first of our seven sessions. Again, of course, he has the right to write about whatever he likes but again I ask, ‘WTF?’

Comrade McShane spoke of how she discovered the play when she was a member of our Workers Theatre Movement in the late 1980s early 90s, and what it meant to her political development. She said how refreshing it was to be involved in plays written to be performed by and for non-theatre actors and audiences. This ties in directly with what Brecht and Eisler wrote in an open letter about the play after its first performance at a Berlin festival had been cancelled: “We render these important activities wholly independent, and let them be managed by those for whom they are intended and who alone have use for them: the workers’ choirs, amateur theatre groups, school choirs and school orchestras - in short, the people who do not want to pay for art, who do not want to be paid for art, but who want to create art.”

When comrade Parker interviewed me about WTM in his blog he took a far less jaundiced view of our cultural efforts. Also on his blog is an expanded version of his letter which gives a bit more verbiage, whilst still displaying the same condescending cynicism.

He does bring up some very interesting material around The measures taken and quite rightly says it needs exploring within its historical context. But he drowns the Brechtian baby in the Third Period bathwater by ignoring its later history, particularly its role in Brecht’s appearance at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on October 30 1947. Parker mentions the play “in the written form of Brecht’s text I have in front of me now”, but I’m sure that it will not be the first ever English translation, which was made specifically by HUAC for that appearance, when Brecht was quizzed at length about its contents. He left the States for good the very next day. Perhaps the 80th anniversary of that next year would be a good time to explore all these issues together?

Parker chooses to deny the right to reply on his blog - his own personal bureaucratic centralism - so I’ll place a response to that here - specifically on the right to respect. I respect him for his interest in and concern for Communist Party history and just wish he would do likewise with what we are attempting to do. I couldn’t care less about his sneering attitude towards me as an actor, but his disdain towards our project is ludicrous. He claims our CU programme was “not very diverse”: we explored not just German communism, but also Italian, Vietnamese, African, ancient Greek, Scottish, Dutch and Yugoslavian texts too. Darko Suvin was an inspiration throughout the programme.

But what I find particularly sad is his dismissive description of our comrade, Esther Leslie, as merely “ex-SWP”, when she is - to say the least - one of the world’s foremost authorities on Walter Benjamin, whom, like his comrade Brecht, we have so much to learn from.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

Ireland decay

The divisions in People Before Profit here in Ireland have a material base and a political significance for the socialist movement.

In recent weeks 15 senior members have resigned from the Socialist Workers Network. The SWN is often seen as the major component of PBP and the members of the resigning group are remaining within PBP. The resignation statement is remarkable, in that it says next to nothing about the political basis of the split - something of a tradition among Irish left groups.

That’s not the case with Red Network - a group that left PBP in opposition to the idea of a left government led by Sinn Féin. Another group, the Marxist Republican Network, remains in PBP, although it also opposes the ‘left government’ notion and argues for an anti-imperialist perspective - both in terms of a 32-county movement and for a European-wide movement against imperialism.

Anne McShane in the Weekly Worker (September 3) and in Aontacht mentions a material problem within the group - the role of Richard Boyd Barrett’s salary and expenses in keeping it afloat - and one political issue: a strategy of government coalition with Sinn Féin and/or the Social Democrats. However, in the end she plumps for an “honest and open party culture”.

There is a serious collapse of the SWN and of a decades-long strategy of left government. Questions of democratic discussion are the medium in which this debate can take place, but they are not the issue itself: it’s the questions of socialist strategy that must be resolved.

The SWN resignation statement poses the differences as generational. The old guard are holding back the ‘Young Turks’. However, if we look more closely at the material basis of PBP, we see right away that it is above all an electoral alliance and that the funds of the organisation are tied to the seats that it holds in the Dáil, in Stormont and in the councils.

In many cases success in these elections depended on transfers from Sinn Féin voters, and this provided impetus for the theory of a left government led by Sinn Féin. This theory (always ridiculous) has become ludicrous, as SF shifted to the right and as its vote has started to fall.

A different dynamic arrived with recent Dáil by-elections. Encouraged by the presidential victory of Catherine Connolly, an electoral movement – Tonn Na Clé - called for left transfers. This did not automatically exclude Sinn Féin, but in the poll it was quite clear that the leftists did not vote Sinn Féin and the ‘Shinners’ did not vote left. In the Dublin Central election Daniel Ennis of the Social Democrats was elected to the Dáil on the back of left transfers. The Sinn Féin vote fell sharply and their votes went towards an anti-migrant right.

The reformist political currents that have been central to the Irish left are disintegrating. The currents were both reformist and electoralist, and belief in the reform of Irish capital or in an electoral road for the working class are no longer convincing. The whole electoral myth rested on Sinn Féin’s ‘leftism’ and on its electoral advances. The idea that Sinn Féin is a left party is ludicrous. Its vote is declining and a place in a Dáil coalition is slipping away.

Why is this? Irish capitalism is rushing full tilt towards a place in Nato and towards war with Russia. The militarisation of Ireland and entry into war would be a disaster. At the same time the coalition is betting the farm on further economic subordination to US imperialism. There is a scramble for further financialisation and privatisation, AI scams and data centres.

Serious attempts are being made to fragment the working class ahead of coming conflicts through racism and anti-migrant sentiment. For all the noise from the far right, the main driver of racism is the government itself.

The drive towards further financialisation is leading to a budget that will see a sharp fall in workers’ standard of living, with negative wage growth and high costs for basic necessities. The public-sector unions are having a song and dance over strike ballots, but the idea that they will walk out from partnership deals with the government after 40 years is implausible.

In the background, the belief that the Good Friday agreement would lead to reform of the northern statelet and an eventual united Ireland has faded away. The British call the shots, sectarian division is built into the system, the economy is in collapse and Sinn Féin policy is to hold on like grim death to their places in the executive.

These are the issues that confront the Irish working class. They will not be resolved by an organisation centred on parliamentary activity and with a political focus based on social issues and equality, diversity and inclusion, a belief that income from transnationals can be used to advance working class interests and with only the most abstract approach to class struggle.

John McAnulty
email

Expelling Chris

Recently the Your Party membership team wrote to former Labour MP Chris Williamson to inform him he had been expelled by membership termination. Chris has appealed against this decision. Republic Your Party (RYP) is calling for his immediate reinstatement.

Chris must have the democratic right to appeal to the next YP national conference. This conference must be able to review these decisions and rectify mistakes and injustices and make those tasked to lead YP accountable to the membership.

RYP opposes this decision on the grounds that it is undemocratic. We oppose it because it is anti-democratic. We oppose it because it weakens the struggle for a republican programme for the party. We oppose it because it undermines building Your Party as a new party of the left.

We are therefore calling on all rank-and-file YP members to support Chris’s reinstatement in solidarity with him. Members must unite to fight for party democracy and solidarity together. Our appeal is to rank-and-file members in branches and to decisions of the Liverpool founding conference.

‘An injury to one member of Your Party is an injury to all of us’ is a slogan from the idea of solidarity deeply embedded in the working class movement. This is not about our opinions about one member or whether we agree with his views. It is about all of us, how democracy is functioning and how any of us can be treated. We have much to learn from this example, because it provides a micro-picture of the politics of Your Party and illustrates what it is becoming.

Republic YP
email

Max fight

Our wretched lives will not be transformed by small increases in wages or maintaining our penurious benefits. A state pension of £13,000 is laughable after 35-40 years of graft.

We must stand on a maximum programme. For example, nurses and orderlies and admin workers in the NHS need to have their wages doubled. So do equivalent workers across the UK. Let’s build houses and give them to our people. No mortgage. No rent. The people will own their homes from day one.

All poor people unable to afford one to have a two-week holiday in the UK paid for: free accommodation and free transport to the holiday resort, plus vouchers to eat at local restaurants and attend cinemas, theatres, water parks, etc. The businesses will be reimbursed directly for their services. A flourishing British tourism season will ensue.

That’s some of the good stuff for our people. Now for the robbers and rich (usually synonymous). All shareholders and managers associated with the rip-off water and rail companies and NHS private contracts to be pursued legally and extra-legally, so we, the people, receive all of the loot robbed from us.

Likewise bankers and insurance brokers will be forced to hand back what they robbed. The 20 families who own the land of Britain will forfeit it. Land reform will mean the British crown will lose all assets and be reduced to a Dutch-style monarchy. The House of Lords to be abolished and all war criminals hiding therein to be sent to the Hague (along with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown).

We will withdraw from Nato and request/force the evacuation of the occupying American forces. All military contracts to be cancelled with the US. All Japanese and American software to be purged from British systems.

All the above is the bones of the maximum programme. Let’s side with Amadeo Bordiga and not with a Lenin who was losing the plot when he wrote his rant against anyone who wanted to approach communism by a different road to the Bolsheviks (the advice to the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s by all Soviet actors was utter nonsense and lengthened the CCP’s march to power).

Like the US, the old UK system is tottering like an old man with gout, who still can’t stay off the gin. Let’s boot aside the old hierarchy and implement 21st century communism, comrades.

Best wishes for a fiery autumn! Full implementation of the max programme!

K Sean
Bolshevik Tendency

Joining lessons

Lenin famously remarked, “An ounce of experience is worth a ton of theory”, and was also fond of the Russian proverb, “Life teaches”.

Following the election of Tony Blair as Labour Party leader in 1994, I resigned, having been a member since 1978. I then joined the newly formed Socialist Labour Party, headed by Arthur Scargill. In the 2000s I joined the Socialist Alliance and then Respect, headed by George Galloway. In the 2010s I joined Left Unity, headed by Ken Loach. In 2025 I joined Your Party, headed by Jeremy Corbyn.

What I have learnt through my involvement in these five organisations is that a democratic socialist party cannot be successfully launched by either following a Labour dictator or by involving members of the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in England and Wales. I have concluded that what is needed is a democratic socialist party similar to the Democratic Socialists of America.

I am therefore asking readers of this paper who would like to see ‘Democratic Socialist Party’ registered with the electoral cåommission to get in touch.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire