By Gerry Downing November 24, 2023

Tony Clark’s letter on Nov 10 accuses me of being dishonest, which he seems to think is the same as being ‘ultra-left’ before going on to champion the politics of Joe Stalin and Jack Conrad against me, on the basis that a parliamentary, democratic, peaceful road to socialism is entirely possible. I don’t think Clark is dishonest, he is simply a pathetic reformist groveller to the capitalist establishment in the rotten tradition of the anti-Marxist Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Back in 1926 Leon Trotsky demolished this political outlook represented by the Fabians, the reformist Labour politicians of the time. Ramsay MacDonald was the main target of his polemic in The Fabian ‘theory’ of socialism, whose political outlook he dubbed “a mental junk shop”.

MacDonald likened the transition to socialism to the natural world where the chrysalis turns into the butterfly. Even that was a sudden break Trotsky observed and alternately pointed to childbirth where the mother suffers great pain, but the appearance of the infant makes for great joy. Amongst pigeon fanciers a fashion arose for selective breeding to produce ever shorter beaks. But the beaks became so short that they could not pierce the shell the chicks inside perished.

Clark’s methodology rejects the beak entirely and there are no generals like Pinochet who overthrew Allende in 1973 or the serving general who asserted in September 2015 in the Sunday Times that the British Army “could stage mutiny under Corbyn”’, an unpunished act of treason. This clearly was General Sir Nicholas Houghton, chief of the defence staff, who openly threatened Corbyn in November 2015. Corbyn complained but Maria Eagle, his shadow defence secretary, treacherously claimed Houghton was right.

Trotsky observed, “the political art of the British bourgeoisie consists of shortening the proletariat’s revolutionary beak, thereby preventing it from perforating the shell of the capitalist state.” The beak being the conscious revolutionary leadership which must replace the reformist Fabians to make the socialist revolution. In that sense it is not at all a direct comparison with nature, socialism will not come as an objective, unstoppable process, or to put it another way the conscious revolutionary leadership becomes itself the prime objective factor in revolutionary situations. Without the Bolsheviks the fascist Black Hundreds would have triumphed in 1917.

It is ridiculous to propose that there should be no relationship between maximum and minimum demands. This is the proposition of the renegade Karl Kautsky, so beloved of Jack Conrad and the CPGB. So, whilst our ultimate goal is the socialist society, on no account should we politically prepare the class consciousness of the existing vanguard of the masses for this great outcome, we must blind our eyes and pretend that socialism will come objectively when the time is ripe, irrespective of human agency and political opposition.

So it was with every great revolution that changed history. Oliver Cromwell decreed the swing of the axe that cut off the king’s head on January 30, 1649, “with the crown upon it”. This was the single most revolutionary act in England’s history; the absolute, semi-feudal monarchy was gone forever. Maximillian Robespierre was the great lion of the French revolution; the reign of terror consigned feudal France to the dustbin of history, along with the heads of the aristocrats. Those ‘bloodthirsty’ revolutionary women looked up from their knitting and cheered with every head that rolled from the guillotine. Lenin and Trotsky directed the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917, the greatest single event ever in the struggle for universal human liberation.

I will dub Clark a ‘scurvy pacifist’ (Trotsky) and, in my defence of the violence of the oppressed, quote from Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland. Here he recounts the execution of 16 spies and informers in West Cork in 1920 and unapologetically notes the success of this operation in sharply reducing the number of IRA volunteers assassinated by the British army:

“There can be no doubt as to why the death roll of the West Cork IRA dropped so amazingly. It was solely because British terror was met by a not less effective IRA counter-terror. We were now hard, cold and ruthless as our enemies had been since hostilities began. The British were met with their own weapons. They had gone down in the mire to destroy us and our nation, and down after them we had to go to stop them.”

Marxists are opposed to individual acts of terror by the oppressed, but we understand why incoherent outbursts of outrage like the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel happen; appalling oppression causes these killings. Lenin never condemned his brother Alexander Ulyanov who was executed in May 1887 for attempting to assassinate the Tsar. Lenin had the same goal but an entirely different method, he aimed to replace individual terror against the ruling class with the mass terror of the risen masses. He never equated the violence of the oppressed with that of the oppressor.

Clark champions Joe Stalin’s British Road to Socialism but is unable to understand how a psychotic mass murderer of tens of millions and all the remaining leaders and participants in the Russian Revolution from 1936-38 could be the same man who wanted a peaceful road to socialism in the UK and in every imperialist country. This was his obscene grovel to imperialism, both ‘democratic’ (Britain, France and the US) and fascist (Germany, Italy and Spain) to prove to them he intended them no revolutionary harm. He drowned the Spanish Revolution in blood in Barcelona in May1937 to makes his pact with Hitler in August 23 1939 to allow his corrupt bureaucracy to continue enjoying their ill-gotten gains.

Clark’s entire letter is also based on an uncritical acceptance of Stalin’s anti-Marxist theory of socialism in a single country, “communists must not

seek to come to power in a backward society. In other words, a society should have reached a certain level of development before any bid for power is made” he claims. That’s Stalinism’s two stage revolution theory, which resulted in South Africa becoming the most unequal country in the world, with the black masses worse off now than under Apartheid. Nelson Mandela has his statue in Parliament Square for counter-revolutionary services to British and global imperialism.

It is not possible to develop capitalism in a single country, trade and a global division of labour is necessary. Socialism, as an infinitely more advance form of production for need and not for profit, is even more impossible in one country.

Moreover, class consciousness is not national in its essence but international and global. A defeat for one national section is a defeat for all, a victory for a national strike or movement is a victory for every national working class.

Lenin understood this when he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 and his April Theses in 1917. This reasserted the practical conclusion; “all power to the Soviets” and world revolution. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is the essence of this understanding. Contrary to Clark Soviet democracy is entirely different and opposed to bourgeois democracy or even ‘extreme democracy’, the CPGB version. The latter is a fraud, the former is the active participation of the masses in deciding their own future by means of instantly recallable delegates on the average wage of a skilled worker to regional Soviets and a national body.

I know this will be very hard to take for all scurvy pacifists but breaking the shell of the state is an act of revolutionary violence which every ruling class in the whole of human history have resisted with the utmost counter-revolutionary violence.  ▲