Jonathan Jones (Labour centrists like me aren’t cynics: we’re the left’s only true ethical wing, 8 August) regurgitates, yet again, the tired old myth that Marxism and Stalinism are somehow basically the same. That the one emerged from the other. This is nonsense (as nonsensical as the idea that there is such as creature as a “Corbynite”). The democratic left, the far left, the anti-Stalinist left (call it what you will) in the UK and elsewhere has a solid and honourable record of anti-Stalinism, actually much better and more consistent than either Labour centrists or the right (Labour or Tory). The left’s analysis and critique of Stalinism, through the writings of Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky, Victor Serge, the Critique group in Glasgow, the now defunct journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe and numerous contributors to the New Left Review (to name just a few of the many voices involved) has been thorough, detailed, nuanced and totally damning.
The centre left and right, by contrast, have had little to offer other than moral outrage, which they were all too ready to drop when circumstances suited them. The left in western Europe has nothing to apologise for in its attitude to Stalinism. As for “the chains of a brutal history”, the left was the first to expose the crimes of Stalin and has fought long and hard to destroy those chains. Stalinism is not a continuation of Marxism, on the contrary it is the absolute negation of it.
John Cunningham
Adlington, Lancashire
• It just shows how far to the right the Labour party has gone when a self-styled Labour centrist associates Jeremy Corbyn with communism: the old red-under-the-bed smear. If Corbyn is in bed with anyone, it’s not Stalin, Lenin or Mao Zedong, but the likes of Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee and Tony Benn – excellent bed-mates at the real centre of Labour’s ethical wing.
Manuel Chetcuti
Norwich
• I love reading Jonathan Jones, but I really wonder why you published this article. It’s full of confused allusions to Soviet communism, state capitalism, the Great Terror and Mao (even kulaks come into it), and we seem to be expected to assume that this has something to do with Jeremy Corbyn. Let’s be clear: Corbyn claims to be a socialist, but that has nothing to do with any of the historical phenomena that Jones talks about. Leninism, which (rather than Marxism) was the root of the terrible experiments in state capitalism which scarred the 20th century, has nothing to do with current Labour politics. Corbyn’s campaign is nothing more than a slight leftward tug counter to the trend towards removing all the limits on private capitalism that has characterised the years since the decline of Soviet Russia removed the need for western states to protect their workers from the worst excesses of big-corporatism in case they listened to the siren voices from the east.
Political discourse shifts over decades and this shift has gone too far by any objective analysis. When you have significant and growing numbers of families dependent on food banks in one of the richest countries in the world, it should not be possible to justify the policies which allow this to happen. And yet the “Labour centrists” Jones claims to belong to have failed conspicuously to identify and condemn them. They have allowed neo-liberals to claim a new common sense in politics (the “centre ground’”, which in reality is no more than a particular ideology that they favour.
There is absolutely no reason why the left should condone it, and in fact every reason why they should not, because if nearly all politicians agree on something the public will be led to agree to it too. Thus the drumbeat of politicians claiming that reducing the national budget deficit (in fact, only one of several deficits currently characterising the British economy, and arguably not the most damaging) is so important that it pre-empts all else; that welfare spending is unsustainable and large numbers of the poor cheat; that illegal immigration is ruining Britain; that a reasonable level of health spending is unacceptable; that markets are always the best way to manage services; that levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s are a price worth paying, and so on, creates the illusion that any departure from it is a fantasy.
Actually what we have now is a fantasy, laboriously built up by people who really believe in unrestrained capitalism. Corbyn is one of the few politicians who question it; Jones’s condemnation is simply evidence of falling for it (though evidence has very little to do with it, if one actually looks at the policies Corbyn recommends). The Labour centrists should get stuck in and start questioning it too.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
• Jonathan Jones refers to the influence of Marxism Today on Labour party debates in the 1980s, singling out an essay by Eric Hobsbawm. But he fails to do justice to the influence of that magazine on subsequent developments in the party, not surprisingly, given that he wishes to sharply demarcate the current Labour leadership (and himself) from the merest whiff of Marxism. But we should recognise the influence that Marxism Today exerted on the formation of the clause IV grouping in the mid-70s. Clause IV was set up to win the Labour student organisation from Militant, a task it successfully carried out with strong support from party officials. Clause IV counted among its supporters Charles Clarke, Peter Mandelson and Mike Gapes, all of whom went on to be prominent Blairite MPs. Some of its members then proceeded to set up the labour coordinating committee,
Bill Sheppard
Sheffield
• I know that art critics are famous for their heightened sensitivity and Jonathan Jones writes movingly of his bad soup moment in 1980s Russia. I was a mature student studying Russian at that time and spent a month in a hostel in what was then Leningrad. The food reminded me of 1950s Britain but came as a great shock to my younger colleagues, who wasted many hours scouring the city in search of non-existent pizzas. One of them also expressed shock at the terrible tower blocks people lived in, until I told her they reminded me of the council estate where I had grown up. To be fair, she had spent a sheltered life in a leafy Hampshire village.
Karen Barratt
Winchester
• Along with others of my generation, I lived through the late 60s and 70s, when I had athree-bed rent-controlled flat (from which I could not be evicted) in Notting Hill Gate, London, for £65 a month; an art college training and living allowance for free; the railways were cheap, ran on time and I rarely had to stand. Electricity, gas and phone costs were relatively cheap, with none of the hassle of having to constantly change supplier; water was included in the rates; and the hospital services was second to none. Jobs were plentiful and equality was the highest it has ever been. There is no good reason for this to have changed, other than people’s ignorance and vulnerability to the trickle-down lies of the Thatcher era, where public assets were sold off for private profit and buccaneer banking took over. Like most of my friends, I don’t consider myself a “leftie”; I am just an ordinary person seeking a way to live together that works for as many people as possible. This is not the world currently offered to my children or grandchildren and I am asking, why ever not?
Mora McIntyre
Hove
• “I am not calling Corbyn a Marxist,” Jonathan Jones insists. No, as a “moderate, reasoned and sceptical” Labour centrist, he is content to lace his article with spectres of “the terrifying reality of Marxism in power”.
Jones says that “on the left you – we – have to face up to what was done in the name of an extreme version of socialism in the 20th century”. He would probably not call Cameron a fascist either, yet by his own logic should he not also be urging us to face up to what was done in the same century by an extreme version of rightwing orthodoxy?
Jones accuses the left of hypocrisy but fails to see the hypocrisy of a centrist Labour party that, in common with Cameron’s Tories, wishes to be seen as the party of working people whilste presiding inertly over the widening gap between rich and poor. And that’s just in the UK. Watch out for centrists telling us we can deal with the surge of migrants from the wrong side of the global prosperity divide by erecting more fences.
Christine Hackett
Bristol
• Jones should pause to shift his focus from the crimes committed under “socialism” and consider the existing world order. No one doubts that capitalism creates great wealth and generally beneficial technological change. However, the benefits are unevenly distributed: capitalism has also brought pollution, famine, wars and untold misery and injustice for millions. So long as capitalism exists, there will be winners and losers. And people, not just the losers, will struggle to change or replace it.
Peter Betts
Liverpool
