To The Editors,
What underlies this bizarre reactionary shift from the self-appointed vanguard of our class? One is the staunch, effectively Hoxhaist anti-revisionism of the New Communist Party and its ilk, which is so very unpalatable to the working masses. The complete unworkability of their clinginess to the personalities of Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, etc, with no possible scope for revaluation of their legacy or ideas, forces the arch-Bolshevists into strange coalitions, after failing, as they always do, to win footholds in the institutional Left, let alone society at large.
There is a second inflow of ideas that shapes the current direction of the NCP, this one requiring deeper exposition. In short, a new current is beginning to run through the Left, what has been termed by the likes of Joti Brar (of the CPGB-ML) and the philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller as “anti-Wokeism.” This counter-cultural variant of Leftism breaks substantially from the liberal worldview (contrastingly, the likes of Momentum or the DSA are saturated with it) in the following ways: 1) its class-oriented critique of identity politics, representationalism and intersectionality; 2) its preferential opinion on the working classes, populism and the labour grassroots; 3) its skepticism of Open Borders and CRT, and its revaluation of the role of the Nation State as a potential vehicle for socialism. This emergent tradition is exemplified by organizations from George Galloway’s Worker’s Party to Markus Allard’s Örebropartiet, news outlets such as the Bellows, and independent podcasts Low Society, Red Scare and many others. Right-wing and mainstream press tend to designate them as the “anti-Woke Left,”as do some of its advocates, but a more accurate description might be the Workerist, “Class First” or even neo-Syndicalist Left.
The NCP clearly shares the view that organization on the basis of identity is insufficient to liberate the working class- and in this they are correct. Only the united labor movement, operating democratically in the economic and political spheres, can deliver the momentum to overcome class society and its inevitable epiphenomenon of poverty, iniquity, wage slavery and the like. Yet they fail to make inroads with the emerging current of Workerism- after all, Workerist Leftists tend also to believe in freedom of speech, the autonomy of working class institutions, the sanctity of human life- all unacceptable in a Stalinist framework. In this sense the new Workerists stand closer to Victor Serge, with his belief in the moral authority of the proletariat, than they do to Lenin and his vanguardism.
What then remains for the NCP, and their co-reactionists, Spiked magazine, shunned as they are by the Institutional Left and the counter-culture alike? Only the allure of Putin, of Dugin, of the siren-song of National Bolshevism- these are the few remaining political forces that might even consider tolerating them. Likewise with the CPGB-ML, with its close ties to the National Bolshevik “Other Russia” movement, and even the Spartacists who call for the complete laying down of arms in Ukraine, indicating nothing more than total capitulation to the reactionary forces of Russian (i.e. bourgeois) plutocracy.
If it is to regain and retain its relevance, the Left must heed the critiques from the Workerist revival. It must shed itself of liberal-academic jargon, which in the words of the DSA-affiliated Marxist Unity Group serves only to foster “a pseudo-radical and easily cooptable variant of identity politics, which sheds the overt pro-capitalism but is bound at the hip to the State through the same politics of representation.”2 It must return its focus to the economic base, to the workers themselves, as only they can become the final gravediggers of Capital.
Regarding issues like Ukraine, Taiwan, Kurdistan, the EU, and NATO, we must of course respect the rights of nations to self-determination, but never should we throw ourselves behind every Second or Third World dictator, in a doctrinaire program of anti-Westernism, just because they happen to have a scrap with the USA. This is nothing but historical materialism with all the history gouged out! Further, in going forward, we must remain on guard against the kind of sectarian neo-Stalinism that so often degenerates into insipid, even outright, National Bolshevik reactionism. We must reject outright the disturbing line trotted out by the so-called “left” supporters of the Putin-Dugin clique, reject the bureaucratism of party dictatorship that masquerades as proletarian democracy, and denounce the myths of national and ethnic exceptionalism spewed by the nationalist media of Russia, bafflingly adopted by some of our “comrades” in the Communist sects. This is to say nothing of the impracticable doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” which no doubt is a further contributor to the NCP’s isolation, to its ever further retreat into the ideological bunkers of Stalinism and National Bolshevism. “Industry” wrote James Connolly, “transcends all limitations of territory and leaps across rivers, mountains and continents.” We should, therefore, like those of the Syndicalist tradition have always done, seek the creation of proletarian coalitions on the basis of economic struggle, in defiance of the political State and the narrow confines of geographic territories, themselves the product of millennia of ruling class warfare, and, therefore, completely illegitimate, whilst always repudiating the poisonous teachings of Stalinism and its unlikely bedfellow, which some Communists call “patriotism” or “self-determination of nations” but which is known to all others on the Left by its true name- “National-Chauvinism.”
Yours,
An Industrial Worker
