I've been away for a long time due to a winter break and a very severe hack. The hack has taken a few weeks to sort out, being a one man band and not a computer programmer. The spooks are still around, but enough of this self justification already.
Before I leave the topic of the Revolutionary Ccommunist Party as a front for the intelligence services of the USA and the UK, so that I can concentrate on other more important stuff for myself, the MS and open politics, a piece about a Christmas time discovery. Or Christmas present, depending on your interpretation.
I spent this years winter festival on a converted barge. A friend and old comrade, Peter and his partner Kate had acquired the boat 18 months ago. She had cancer and the boat was a refuge of sorts while she battled with it. Kate 'popped her clogs' in March and Peter has had a succession of visitors since - not all have meant for an easy time. Their dog, Douza died a few months after Kate and then, in Sept/Oct his new lover survived an overdose of medicine while on the boat. 2 days after Christmas Day, Peter was emailed about the death of an old lover from cancer. Not a good year for him, but the Loafer is resilient enough to get through with a little help from friends. It was not a morbid time.
Who was there? On the way I picked up an anarchist, grandmother, ex-snapper and declared Celibate who now works for the Home Office. Lesley helped with the driving there and back and is quite bonkers. How the hell she succeeded in being politically vetted by the Home Office, I have no idea! Unless of course one remembers the Home Office's notorious and legendary inefficiency. Two Les' driving. Already at the boat when we arrived were Ann & Ross and Yvonne. Ann and Ross have been together for years, since as long as I can remember knowing them and both women are quite bonkers. Ann is in remission from cancer but is worried that some latest tests may have pointed to a relapse. They're still angry that Kate went up and died on them but it was not a morbid time.
Yvonne is a short story in herself. She's an architect who split with her long-term partner of 15 years, Debbie four months previously, has a degenerative, auto-immune disease similar to my MS though it is not active in the central nervous system but at the nerve system's periphery. A much more exotic disease. We spent some time comparing symptoms like a pair of old hypochondriacs. We both get 'flaring' on sensitised patches of skin and our limbs feel like we have been given a local anaesthetic that is wearing off but never will. A fanatic about cartoons and graphic novels who describes herself as a geek and is quite bonkers.
Many years ago I annoyed Yvonne by going on a date to the flicks with her then girlfriend, Julia to see a Chris Menges film, 'A World Apart'. (A 1988 film about Ruth First and the relationship with her daughters during the struggle in South Africa against Apartheid. It was an Oscar shoo-in after winning at Cannes, but for the American distribution company going bankrupt two weeks before it's American release. No accident I think). Yvonne and I hadn't met for ages until bumping into each other a couple of years ago in, of all places, the MRI scanning unit at Guy's Hospital. She's now my 'blood' sister and it was not a morbid time.
The food was fabulous. Nursing Kate has improved Peter's cooking skills somewhat. I still remember with a shudder the time in Wales when we were frying up some trout with fresh chillies and not enough oil in the pan. The kitchen was smoked out with chilli flavoured fumes that burnt the eyes and lungs and forced a quick evacuation to the garden. Dangerous cooking. Or the time we failed to even roast a chicken. Oops!
Lesley and I were met on arrival with lobster. The first time I've had it and it won't be the last. Tidy. Over the next week we dined very lavishly. A protein binge, as was the original mid-winter festival/feast prior to monotheism's rise and subsequent imposition of an alien religious ceremony upon it. Duck, venison, turkey, lamb, beef, snails, oysters. Smoked salmon & scrambled eggs for Christmas day breakfast, washed down with champagne and orange juice smacks of decadence. But was bloody nice. Polish vodka over lemon sorbet for pudd. Remembering and writing this has me salivating and I make no apology for the extravagance.
Most, if not all northern hemisphere societies have a mid-winter feast that historically pre-dates monotheism by a long stretch. Subsistent farming required that those animals that were not going to be bred from in the spring were slaughtered, processed into sausage or some other means of preserving the meat through winter and that which isn't preserved, is binged on in a mid-winter festival. Slaughtering non-breeding stock also frees land for farming crops for human consumption instead of animal feed. A very sensible response to seasonal changes. We were clever then.
Loads of reading, good music from Dylan to east European war-time marching songs - I kid you not. And a lot of wine.
If I haven't mentioned it, Peter is also quite bonkers. I was not the only sane person there - as in 'every-bodies mad but me' - just the weirdest and wobbliest.
One evening, when the women had gone to their cabins to sleep, read or watch some films I'd brought along or just to get away from the politically incorrect men, Peter and I settled down to smoking some blow, drinking and general chat about the old Communist Party of Great Britain. I mentioned my previous posting to this blog and the
RCP's malignant influence on the internet and it's rumoured association with the UK and US intelligence agencies. Peter's response was to find a site purportedly for the CPGB on the internet. Now I know that the CPGB no longer exists. Been there, done that but didn't get a T-shirt. I even spoke at the Nov. 1991 Congress in support of the finalisation of changes of name, constitution, structure etc. etc. A decision that made yours truly redundant as Welsh Secretary of the CPGB.
The new name was Democratic Left, then a couple of years later the New Politics Network. I think there may have been other name changes, but they have also gone, dead as Monty Python's parrot. The financial assets passed on to the post-CP successor organisations have been collared by the Trades Union Congress. There is no CPGB.
I didn't follow the protracted disintegration to closely after redundancy, being more interested in developing my photography while trying to survive on unemployment benefit. Peter was elected to the job of Secretary of Chwith Democrataidd - Welsh Democratic Left - and followed the process of collapse. I remember him being very angry over some of the shenanigans. I was pleased to be out of it.
At some point though, through these final death throes of a once respected revolutionary organisation, the name seems not to have been incorporated in the articles of a successor. The name was discarded as having failed.
The 'CPGB' web site is a front. Despite the links that try and lay claim to the defunct, no longer existent Communist Party's history. Non of their sources are original. I'd seen the site before but had dismissed it as a Maoist attempt to nick the 'brand'. They were the only grouplet I thought nuts enough to think they could benefit from such a discredited name. But Peter thought RCP and I now think he maybe right. Even if it is not, it is a site operated by the secret intelligence services of one country or the other, the US or UK.
But why? One reason is obvious - the harvesting of email and computer addresses of those searching for alternative reasons other than the official version for, and ways out of, the mess our world is in. Another is the throwing into confusion the history of the left in Britain. Yet another is to direct politically naive youth who may be invited to attend their meetings, toward the dangerous and anti-intellectual emotionalism of messianic exhortation that seems to infect some of the so-called atheists masquerading as Marxists.
The Leninist construct that had inspired the formation of revolutionary parties and liberation movements around the world from 1917, collapsed having failed to achieve it's proclaimed objectives. From 1988 to 1990 I was 'conflicted' (although that piece of jargon was not available then!), not sure whether this was the demise of the Communist Parties or not. Confusion reigned. In the end I took all this as not just a crisis in, and of the Communist Parties but as a crisis of political parties per se. I think that still stands. Though the notes for my contributions to the CPGB congresses of 1990 and 1991 have long been lost or stolen, the general gist was;
The political party is a reality which has appeared only recently in the development of human society. They are the most complex and advanced of organisations that people have yet developed. They have evolved, in the course of struggle as a means by which, in a complex society, abstract ideas of democracy, historic interpretation and shared values, amongst many other concepts, are brought into common purpose and given concrete expression. They have a remit which is as vast as the diversity that is the human condition to one that is as narrow as reaction, and all the shades between. The struggle between which, is the terrain where to 'become' or not is thought and fought out.
The Communist Party arrived on the global stage in Russia during, and was shaped by the 'industrialisation' of death as seen in WW1 between 1914/17. This Leninist construct was ostensibly 'democratic centralist' where decisions taken by the membership were binding on both membership and a leadership who had to carry them out. In reality it was hierarchical, very much like a military organisation in that the orders came from the top and went down. Very understandable considering the circumstance in 1917 and the subsequent invasion of Russia by the armies of the US, GB, Finland and others, trying to crush the revolution after WW1 was, unsurprisingly brought to a quick end.
I'm no expert on this period, it's not why I joined the CPGB, but it seems to me that the Russian revolution was a 'revolution of the moment' during a specific and historic time in a specific country and which could not be replicated across the world. It's moment was then - 90 years ago. Again understandably, revolutionaries from around the world adopted the Leninist construct - the democratic centralist political party - as the vehicle for change.
The undemocratic practises that result from this form of organisation are patronage and the creation of self-perpetuating elites. The 'recommended list' (a collection of names recommended as the new leadership by the 'retiring' leadership and put to the CP's congress for election), was long established in the CPGB and demands conformity. It showed a clear lack of respect for peoples ability to make their own decisions and suggests they do not have the intellectual ability to make political choices. Choices they make everyday by just living. Despite the responsibility demanded of them in their work, their families and their communities they were expected to vote as they were told.
A political party that relies on patronage and the self-perpetuation of an elite soon finds that it not only loses it's volunteer membership but that even worse, the intellectual function of the organisation ossifies. The understanding of Marx and his relevance to the modern was nearly reduced to the quoting of text as if literalist believers in a Bible, Qu'ran or Torah. And the Party claimed to be the home of intellectuals!
(As an aside. I was a member of the Political Committee of the CP from 1989 till 1992. It was at a PC meeting during this time that we were informed a journalist had gained access to the KGB files in Moscow and had discovered incontrovertible evidence that the CPGB had been in receipt of millions of Pounds from the Russians. We received this news before it hit the papers. I think sitting next to me was my old friend Bill Innes, the Yorkshire Secretary, who, speaking before me, went and pinched the words I had jotted down; "Lied to again!" Admittedly I had crossed them out, which goes to show just how 'conflicted' I was at the time.
The Bagman for the CP was Rueben Falber who used to collect the money, at times over £100,000. in cash, from the Russians and East Germans and carry it, via public transport across London in a shopping bag. On 5th December last year I had the opportunity to spend an hour or so with David Shayler, ex-MI5, and during our conversation he mentioned that the longest serving and most important agent MI5 had in the CP was code named M142. Shayler claimed the agent was a member of the CP's Executive Committee from the 1960s to the formation of Democratic Left in 1992. No one actually survived that long on the EC. Falber was a member of the EC from the 1960s but was not a member when I started to serve on it. Yet he remained a Director of the CP controlled companies right up to the end of the CPGB and the beginning of Democratic Left. Only thinking on this after the Shayler meeting did I make the linkage. It is probably old news to many, but for me it wasn't.)
It was not just the internal tensions and contradictions that did for the Communist Parties. Their main enemy, international capital under the leadership of the US Establishment, took the opportunity represented by the mistaken intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to launch a two pronged assault on the Soviet Union that ultimately helped secure the collapse of the Soviet state and the Communist Parties. It is now widely known that the US funded and trained the opium war lords and Al Qa'ida to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as a means to drain the blood from the Red Army the same way the Vietnamese did for the US armed might. But what is not widely understood or reported is the oil price-war that was conducted at the same time.
During the 1980's OPEC was selling oil, for sustained periods, below the cost it took the Soviets to get theirs out of the ground. Oil accounted for 50% of the Soviet Union's foreign currency earnings and they were selling at a massive loss. From 1981 through 1992 George the First was vice-president to Reagan and then president. His contacts with the Saudi's, by far the most important member of OPEC in terms of oil reserves and pumping capacity, made sure this happened.
The unforeseen circumstances of this extremely cheap oil - as low as ten dollars a barrel - was to be the sudden surge in the growth of China and a hurrying to meet Peak Oil. Help bring down one enemy while strengthening another and weakening yourself. Almost as clever as Prescott Bush helping fund Hitler's rise to power during the 1920s/30s. Now we have arrived at Peak Oil, Bush the son, the grandson, threatens the world with nuclear annihilation. Shelley knew their type well;
_______________________
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
______________________
Political parties in America have been in crisis since
The Time of the Toad as Dalton Trumbo named the time of the anti-communist witch hunts and suppression of mass politics. A monopoly of power has, from then on been held by a single party with two names - Republican/Democrat - representing the interests of different factions of the singular, capitalist class.
The graft, the contemptuous flaunting of corruption and the obscene amounts of money needed to campaign, the purchasing of representation, has undermined any respect for political parties and the electoral process. Added to the physical intimidation of stopping people voting, the act of voting has itself been hijacked with counting machines that are blatantly rigged, and which are owned by Bush supporters who vocally guaranteed, pre-election that he would win a second term. The continual psychological assault on the poor and poor-paid by being blamed for their predicament, the cutting of benefits and wages in the deliberate worsening of already dire conditions by Democrat and Republican administration alike has alienated millions from participation. The disillusion in politics and political parties this has created is shown by voter turn out for elections. The figures are abysmal. What political opposition there is, is localised, no bad thing in itself, but with no national reach their influence on American foreign policy is somewhat limited to say the least.
The anti-war movement is split and riddled with government agents playing one off against the other the best they can. And probably acting the agents provocateur in some of the self proclaimed Leninist/Trotskyist/Maoist grouplets - that still seek to be the vanguard by sloganising against each other whilst the proletariat they claim leadership of get on with organising themselves in either total ignorance of the grouplets ideas and presence or if known, dismissed as irrelevant in the struggle to put food in their proletarian childrens mouths.
America is now at the point of this crisis in political parties where non-violent extra-parliamentary actions are being deemed terrorist and outlawed. Such things as holding up banners, wearing t-shirts criticising Bush or even heckling 'nonsense', can have you arrested and questioned under anti-terrorism laws here in Britain as well as in the US. The British Establishment is like Greece to Imperial Rome, willingly being led to their own slavery.
There is not much to say about the crisis in political parties in Britain, it being so bloody obvious. If people had not seen it before then the first substantial act of Blair's first government - the cutting of single parent benefit with hardly a whimper from Labour MPs - showed how far the well-being of ordinary people was from Labour Party leadership thinking. In the last election the Labour Party only secured 22% of those eligible to vote, the turnout being so low. Partly apathy, but also anger at the war and a conscious turning away from political parties are part of the explanation.
The Labour Party still got elected, due in part to the 'first past the post' electoral system but also because of the crisis the Tories have been in since the disastrous reign of Thatcher and her ultimate ousting. They have recently chosen a new, younger, thrusting leader - their 5th in 9 years. A toff from Eton cynically and unconvincingly trying to masquerade as a common, people-friendly man like Bush or Blair.
A crisis in Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats has been raging since the beginning of the year. The most senior party to campaign against the war has had its leader ousted for alcoholism. One of the four contenders for the vacant position was forced out of the campaign by a 'rent-boy' sex scandal exposed by a Murdoch paper. Another forced to admit gay relationships in his past that he had previously denied. The election of the new Tory party leader has everything to do with the destabilising of the Liberal Party as a means to position the Tories as the only viable electoral alternative to Labour. Blair doesn't mind. Whoever leads the Labour Party into the next elections will benefit, a two-sided fight is preferable to a three-cornered one because it has the potential to scare the left of the Liberal Democrat voter base into voting Labour. The present balance in the Commons was a result of last years general election when the Liberal Democrats emerged as an alternative to both Tory and Labour. It must make Blair's neocon allies in Washington very happy.
(The crisis in the Liberals has not stopped them winning a stunning victory in the Dunfermline by-election on 09/02/06 overturning what seemed an unassailable margin of 11,000 votes in winning the seat. A 15.7% swing. The only explanation is the anti-war sentiment in Scotland and the position of the Liberals.)
Behind-the-scenes dirty politics and lying to camera are the order of the day for political parties. This and the recognition by the general public that national parties have very little influence over the decisions of the multi-national conglomerates and the oligarchs that are driving Bush and Blair's rapacious acquisition and/or control of the worlds resources, at this point of Peak Oil and climate change, has made them redundant in meeting the needs of the poor.
The anti-war movement in Britain seems to be fairly moribund, reduced to a yearly demo or the occasional 24hr emergency call for a picket. Very little media exposure, no stunts and local peace organisations are only functioning patchily across the country. The recent introduction of new authoritarian government bills on ID cards and terrorism seem to have had a chilling effect on the movement despite the opposition against them.
The Chair of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is an old comrade of mine. Kate Hudson - another Hackney CP member - and myself used to work together for the London District of the CPGB through 1985/6. She was the only one in that office who came close to understanding my incorrigibility. Kate has many admirable qualities but one of them is not leadership. The imagination and boldness needed at this juncture, with the threatening of nuclear attack against Iran, is wanting. Kate is more an administrator/organiser. Another old 'comrade' of mine was Andrew Murray, a leading member of 'Stop the War Coalition'. We never did see eye to eye, hence the quotes around comrade. Andrew was one who found himself outside the CP following the 1984 Extraordinary Congress, for which I acted as the logistics hub, and which expelled a Stalinist faction grouped around the CP's daily paper, the Morning Star. They formed a new party called the Communist Party of Britain who also have a website attempting to lay claim to CPGB history. Cheeky.
The main cause for the crisis in national political parties has been the globalisation of capitalism since WWII and which accelerated following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has brought untellable miseries to the mass of humanity but it has also ushered in the glimmer of a New Political Formation. Marx has written somewhere (and I am not going to search out the exact quote) that capitalism would come to dominate the world but that this would also give rise to its nemesis. If this is wrong then Marx should have said it! This process was slowed with the advent of the Soviet Union. Lenin, the supreme opportunist, took the opportunity presented by the revolutionary moment in 1917 in Russia to 'turn the world upside down'. And who is to say it should not have happened? The experiment may have failed, but its failure has exposed the limits of 'democratic centralism' as an organisational tool for the revolutionary left. The Russian revolution has also shown that turning the world upside down can be done. That a new world is achievable.
It is a truism that there are leaders and led, but how do the led decide who their leaders are? Certainly not by the patronage of those already leaders as in democratic centralism's recommended list or with the spending of vast amounts of money that leaves the field open only to the rich capitalist as in the American system.
The complexity and diversity that is the everyday reality of our chaotic human condition, require complex and diverse agencies to represent the aspirations, desires and interests of the poor and exploited peoples of the world. A political formation that is loose, lets individuals or groups come and go as their interests wax or wane but that is influenced by those interests; allows space for initiative, develops new ways of imagining and whose range of possibilities will not be defined or confined by neoliberalism or the failed Leninist construct. It will be a formation that respects the autonomy of individuals, and the differences within its constituent parts and yet that can still respond quickly to events. That marries the intellect to the will to act for the common good. A new history not it's end.
It is not for me, or others who claim to be of the left to provide a blueprint detailing the principles that should guide the growth and development of any new political formation. The constituent parts and the people involved in them will produce their own organisational principles as they concretely relate to the conditions in which people find themselves and which help in forwarding their economic, social, cultural and political requirements.
A new global political leadership will not be found inside the core of the Empire, America and Britain, but at its periphery, from those suffering and struggling against imperial exploitation. This is not to say that in these two countries it is a waste of time organising against the war. It is patently obvious that it is needed and the priority for the American and British people is stopping the war. Our solidarity with those subject to domination and exploitation by the Empire is by stopping the war – everything else has to be subsumed into the struggle against the war. It's the war. Nothing less, nothing more. The war.
Any hope that our species has in coming through Peak Oil and climate change, let alone building a society based on respect, dignity and reciprocity between peoples and with our environment, requires the stopping of the war before its nuclear escalation.
Those who claim that the anti-war movement must be anti-imperialist in ideology in America and Britain and act in ways that cause splits are committing a fatal error. They are actively working in aid of the war-mongers whether they believe it or not. The broadest alliance of forces and individuals are needed in this struggle irrespective of their revolutionary purity. I fancy that the liberal baiting, God devouring, commie word-machine, Joe Bageant would be on bended-knee converting in preparation for the Rapture if one of his
"Mutt people" were so much as to have a fleeting thought about signing a petition against the war. Yet these are the people who have to be won. Go on, make Joe God-fearing and not God-devouring. I dare you.
A mendacious position is being put forward that the only way to defeat Bush/Blair and end the war is violently. Falsehoods propagated, in most part by 'left' organisations fronting for the US and UK intelligence services.
That old mate of Marx, Engels wrote something in 1844 about the British working class not being able to militarily defeat their rulers. He was right 160 years ago and he is right today. Engels is coming under attack in the US by the likes of Stan Goff who had me fooled for a while that he was of the left. Goff has applied the same tactics used here, in Britain 20 years ago by the Revolutionary Communist Party. Attacking the a weakness of Marxism - feminism - with a critique that dismisses Engels'
The Family, Private Property and the State, is a very sophisticated feint to distract from and ultimately to obscure the non-violent, mass nature of revolutionary change implicit in Engels'
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. There is a way that American and British people can help in stopping the war. In fact their role is crucial. It is still not to late and Gandhi was right. Non-violent, mass participatory civil disobedience and direct action along with the myriad of actions from petitioning to leafleting by individuals and small groups. The war machine needs to be stopped and big sacrifices will need to be made if billions be saved. But the going to war in America or Britain to stop war will not work. There is no such thing as 'the war to end all wars' unless by it we mean the war of our species extinction.
One of the global organisations whose presence should be universal amongst the anti-war movements in America and Britain and in the blogosphere but isn't, is the
BRussells Tribunal. Their findings and recommendations for actions, as presented by the
World Tribunal on Iraq, are the only game in town for the anti-war movement in America, Britain and Europe. The actions are the means by which the non-violent anti-war movement can coalesce and unite around, so why are they being ignored?!
The leadership of the American and British left need to show some humility and accept that innovations in political tactics, organisational principles, intellectual clarity and ethical/moral mores emerging from the struggles in parts of the poorer world need to be adopted/adapted here at home.
What could become the new political formation is not based upon a nation state, even if some states are helping to give it shape and space to grow by hosting events or acting as inspirational example - even they will be changed by it. The World Social Forum has the potential. Enough of the groans already!
The WSF is an organic initiative that was originally recognised and used as an international forum for grass-roots activists and intellectuals opposing the neo-liberal globalisation agenda in theory and practise. A space where people could share knowledge and experiences; make friends, links and alliances; exchange imaginings and project an alternative perspective to global integration that benefits and celebrates humanity's diversity and chaotic complexity .
A debate is just starting, following the latest round of events in Caracas, Bamako and Karachi, on how far, and if, the WSF should move toward taking on an overtly political character. Big question. The WSF is already a political movement with a presence on the world stage in direct opposition to the neo-cons imperial crusade. But can it become what the new world of our dreams so desperately needs?
I've slagged off Lenin a bit in this piece so to end I ought to give the old man a credit for the best imagining metaphor, ever;
"We see the new world through the windows of the old."
© Les Skeates
younger than she is.
Lillian Brown is not 79 but 89 and not only did she do well for a 79 year old, she did bloody marvelous for an 89 year old. I have also found out she is a 'cradle-snatcher'. Donald, her husband is only 84. He was there at the demo as well (right). Two old commies, as tough as nails.
younger than she is.
birth at Greenham.
birth at Greenham.
