[The following is a letter to the Weekly Worker, the newspaper of the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The CPGB's Mike Macnair
advocated proportional representation in a 4 June article to which the
letter I'm responding to was a reply. This week's issue will be more
important than most since it will be sold at the SWP's Marxism 2009
event.]


John Robinson ("Kill them", Letters, 25 June) said that Lenin argued
that "the fundamental principles of communism" are "soviet power and
the dictatorship of the proletariat", with the latter phrase meaning
rule just by the working class. Lenin did indeed call for "all power
to the soviets" when he returned from exile to Russia in 1917
contradicting the position of his party (the Bolsheviks) in calling
for a Constituent Assembly, and he played a key role in persuading the
party to abolish the Assembly after they lost the elections to it
following the October revolution. Rather than basing our positions on
what Lenin said, after which there have been 90 years of world
capitalism, surely it is time to reassess, and it is good that the
CPGB is doing that and has adopted something I have been plugging for
a while, including in letters to this paper - proportional
representation (PR).

The CPGB is not the only Marxist party to adopt PR - two Socialist
Party editorials (The Socialist, 14 May and 28 May) and the Socialist
Workers Party's (SWP's) Alex Callinicos (Socialist Worker, 6 June)
have done so, and I have heard that the Morning Star's Communist Party
of Britain supports the single transferable vote (STV) form of PR.

STV is the fairest form of PR because it avoids the need for tactical
voting and allows voters to choose between candidates of the same
party rather than giving enormous power to party machines (in
constructing party lists for the recent European elections for
example). STV is used in the Republic of Ireland, and transfers
enabled the Socialist Party's Joe Higgins to win one of the three
Dublin Euro seats; the same system enabled that party and the People
Before Profit Alliance (involving the SWP) to win some council seats
on the same day. STV would not be as conducive to the fortunes of the
British National Party (BNP) since they would receive few transfers
and there would no longer be a dilemma of who to vote for to keep that
party out. The leading Labour politicians including Gordon Brown who
are plugging alternative vote (AV), which requires a candidate to get
50% after transfers, arguing for it on the basis of keeping the BNP
out, are trying to con us into accepting a very unproportional system
that would massively favour the mainstream parties (and would have
given Labour an even bigger landslide in 1997).

John complains about the prospect of "all members of the capitalist
class and their counterrevolutionary hangers-on each (having) a vote
equal to that of revolutionary workers". What's he worried about?
Either there's so few of them that they can easily be out-voted or
there's so many of them that a revolution is not practicable at that
time and attempting an insurrection would be doomed to almost certain
failure. He argues that "the capitalist class will, as at present,
have total control of newspapers and the mass media". He is wrong -
what about the role of the left press including the Weekly Worker and
the internet? He is also confusing a pre-revolutionary situation (in
which those who control the mass media may try to exclude left-wing
voices) with the situation after a revolution in which the masses
coming to power can control the media irrespective of whether a
"dictatorship of the proletariat" is established (but doing so
suggests that dictatorship would try to keep dissenting voices
completely out of the media leading to the opposite problem - giving
parties access to the media according to their level of support would
be preferable). Although John says that "the task of communists is not
to hold polite conversations with fascists" but "to shoot them", I
suspect he considers that the same fate should await anybody who
objects to all power being in the hands of the working class.



I will attend the SWP's upcoming event Marxism 2009, and call for a
democratic revolutionary socialist party, which stands for
proportional representation and what is sometimes called
"participatory democracy" (involving some degree of workers' control:
soviets), in contrast to the wishy-washy "half-way houses" (as you
have called them in your paper) - broad formations like Respect, the
Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity and No2EU that blur divisions
between revolution and reform. Such broad formations were in my view a
good idea before the current economic crisis, but it would have been
better if revolutionaries within such parties had put forward their
views more rather than such parties almost entirely putting forward
reformist lowest common denominator politics. However, now that
capitalism is self-destructing and with the mainstream parties set to
all stand for massive public spending cuts and/or tax rises at the
next general election, we need to point out the need for a sudden
thorough change of society, whether or not we use the word
"revolution". A reply to the SWP's open letter to the left by Michael
Rosen (Socialist Worker, 20 June) suggests "a federation or umbrella"
of cooperating groups/parties that don't stand against each other as
the way forward, and this is probably the best that can be achieved in
the short term bearing in mind the hostility and sectarianism between
different left groups in Britain. It would be a crying shame if such a
federation was constructed and none of its participants put forward
such a revolutionary programme, to determine which sort of party is
most effective in practice.



--
Steve Wallis (Manchester, England)
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