Weekly Worker 133 Thursday March 7 1996
Letters
Common sense
Thank you for the space in your paper (February 22).
The taped interview took place in very difficult and noisy circumstances and as a consequence one major error was made which I write to correct.
In the final paragraph of my response to the question, “How do you see revolution?”, the word “not” shouldn’t have been used. The paragraph should have read: “My view, accepted in our organisation, is that Marxism is really common sense.” Indeed in one of the first political discussions I had with Militant comrades I was impressed by the response that, “Marxism is the distillation of the experiences of the working class - and is a guide to action”.
Keep up the good work.
Councillor Wally Kennedy
Millitant Labour, Hillingdon
British Imperialism
Clive Carr (letters February 29) is wrong to declare himself to be cutting off all links with the CPGB over our position on Ireland. He and other comrades should stay and fight out their political beliefs rather than walking away. You should treat your fellow comrades more seriously than that.
I want to take up some of the points in his letter. Firstly, the reason we give “unconditional support” to the IRA is because we defend their right to self-determination against the British state. British imperialism did a clever stitch-up job in 1921. It divided Ireland and created a loyalist statelet in order to maintain its rule there. This it did against the wishes of the majority - 80% of whom voted for Sinn Fein. However clever that move was though, it did not solve the national question. Today’s IRA are simply another generation of fighters who stand alongside and are no different in essence from the fighters of 1916. By siding with them against the state which created this stitch-up we are opposing imperialism’s right to oppress. We are taking on the ideology and practice of British imperialism in a very concrete way.
We need to win the working class in Britain to take up this struggle. The methods developed in Ireland have been used against them in the miners’ strike, the Brixton riots and the Criminal Justice Act. By continuing to support our enemy’s denial of self-determination, the British working class are stabbing themselves in the back. Particular tactics are not the point. The IRA’s target is not the working class, but the state.
True, the IRA and Sinn Fein are not socialist revolutionaries. Neither are Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat. In today’s political climate, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, these ‘hot-spots’ are suing for an “imperialist-brokered peace”. We need to be vehemently critical of their politics, while defending their rights. The same was and is true in Palestine and South Africa. The coming to power of the PLO has meant pitifully little for the Palestinian masses. Yet you, and we, defended, and should continue to defend, the intifada and their use of violence in their fight against the oppressor state of Israel. The same was true in South Africa, where the ANC used litter bin bombs which blew up in shopping arcades.
Ireland needs independent working class politics. It needs a Communist Party. One of its great problems is that it has concentrated its revolutionary fervour simply on the national question. But we don’t get that Party by calling on John Major to make peace. It is a contradiction in terms.
The majority of the left have a stinking record on Ireland. It is alright to cheer on the ANC and the PLO in their armed struggle, but bring it closer to home and it is a different story. Their liberalism and the influence of bourgeois propaganda comes to the fore. We are told by the SWP, Militant Labour and Clive that the best thing is for John Major to make ‘peace’ and then we can get back to ‘real’ - ie, trade union - politics. This reduces the struggle of the working class to an economic one.
We need to make the working class the champion of democracy in this heartland of imperialism. This is an important debate to be had. Walking away is no good. We are fighting to forge a Communist Party where there will be many different and often conflicting ideas and where factions can operate on a permanent basis. In order to be part of that you need to stay in and fight.
Siobhain Mc Loughlin
Brent
Wrong side
Armchair ‘revolutionaries’ never have any difficulty in condemning colonialism and imperialism in the abstract, and supporting armed struggles against such repression - when they occur on distant shores. But when it is our ‘own’ imperialism that is being combated, particularly when the fight is being fought out within the aggressor’s borders, not only do these false friends withhold their support - they openly take sides with the aggressor!
The North Herts supporters branch has decided to “sever all links” with the Party over our Provisional Central Committee’s principled support for the IRA, against the British state. The Docklands bomb was, according to these home county ‘communists’, “a cowardly attack on a soft civilian target”. Echoing the very words of the bourgeoisie, they add, “A new terror campaign on the British mainland or in the Six Counties will serve no progressive purpose whatsoever.”
It may have escaped your notice, comrades, but the bomb struck at one of imperialism’s most prestigious centres, sent the insurance and banking establishment into a panic and wiped millions off the value of the stock market. In order to avoid injury to civilians, 90 minutes’ warning was given.
In terms of the IRA’s own aims it was remarkably successful. Within three weeks it forced the British to name the date for all-party talks and completely drop their ‘decommissioning’ precondition for Sinn Fein to join the negotiations. The IRA has only to announce a new ceasefire and the ‘peace’ process, so cherished by our ex-‘supporters’, will be given fresh impetus.
The North Herts branch, along with ML, the SWP and a whole section of the petty-bourgeois left, fondly imagine that “the old sectarian divide ... has started to dissolve” in the Six Counties during the ceasefire. There is not the slightest evidence of that. All politics in the North has always been defined by the border itself. To build genuine working class unity the border has to be removed from politics - by driving out the imperialist forces. What kind of working class unity can be built with pro-imperialist loyalists?
The IRA fought a heroic 25-year war of resistance against British imperialism, which should have enjoyed the active support of the British working class, not chauvinistic condemnation. The IRA now wants an “imperialist-brokered peace”, underwritten by the USA. Nevertheless it remains the duty of all communists to support its revolutionary fight against our ‘own’ ruling class.
Ted Jaszynski
North London
Giving support
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the support you have given us during the campaign we carried out to protest the killing of Metin Goktepe, a reporter of Evrensel, the Turkish daily newspaper. As you can remember, he was beaten to death by the police on January 8, while trying to do his job.
Although the official investigation has already identified the policemen responsible for the killing, their trial is purposely being delayed.
We hope to get your continuous support as Turkey is notorious for its bad human rights record.
Kenan Ates
UK representative
Militant and the SLP
The recent article by Julie Hyland in International Worker entitled, ‘Militant Labour seeks a regroupment around Scargill’, criticises ML for not responding to Dave Hyland’s open letter with regards to Peter Taaffe’s call for discussion around the formation of a new socialist party (International Worker 206).
Hyland argues that ML is now “moving in a reactionary direction”, and increasingly orientating itself towards sections of the bureaucracy and middle class on a “national reformist perspective”, and so “breathing new life into the corpse of national reformism”.
The empirical evidence for this prognosis is provided by the recent Socialist Forum meeting in Glasgow, and the hostility displayed at this meeting in regards to the attempt made to put forward the internationalist perspective of the International Communist Party.
The problem with this political analysis is that ML is defined in relation to its response - or lack of response - to the open letter of Dave Hyland. This subjectivism means that such an analysis is actually abstracted, or isolated, from any possible elaboration of the theoretical and political character of the practice of ML.
We are not told whether ML is reformist or centrist. Instead the ICP rely upon crude sociological criteria to define ML as a middle class radical group, but which at the time of Dave Hyland’s open letter initiative briefly became a socialist-inclined organisation.
In our open letter to the ICP, the Trotskyist Unity Group called for theoretical objectivity regarding the ICP’s characterisation of ML. Unfortunately this has not occurred, and instead the ICP retreats towards its typical holier-than-thou stance in order to maintain a ‘principled’ distance from recent political developments.
The increasing objectivist, activist and catastrophist perspective of the ICP, alongside its imminent perspective of the building of a mass revolutionary party, means that it tries to gloss over the political problem of the ideological hegemony of left reformism concerning the dominating role of ML with regards to the formation of the SLP. The ICP’s political critique of the SLP and ML becomes the basis to refuse to address the prospect of building a united front against the attempt to reinforce the hegemony of right and left reformism within left politics.
It is in this context that the ICP’s refusal to address the questions raised by the TUG only facilitates their retreat into party ultimatism, and a related complacency about their ability to bury the corpse of reformism.
Hence the ICP’s proclamation concerning the deceased nature of reformism actually adds up to a subjective denial of the necessity of theoretical struggle against all forms of reformism, including ML.
Indeed the reinforcement of this exclusive party ideology facilitates the nationalist trajectory of the ICP in political terms. This is indicated by the national chauvinist character of their recent condemnation of the resumption of IRA military activity (Independent Worker 206, editorial). Instead the TUG calls upon the ICP to study the theoretical statements of the TUG, in order to address these serious political questions. But rest assured, the TUG will not wash its hands of the ICP, regardless of the type of response which is immediately forthcoming.
Phil Sharpe
Trotskyist Unity Group
Correction
In the Weekly Worker 131 (February 22), ‘Timex strike remembered’ incorrectly quoted “Bernadette Malone, a leading member of the strike committee”. This should have read “Charlie Malone”.
