Weekly Worker 404 Thursday October 18 2001

Letters

Pacifism wins

I’ve read Eddie Ford’s article, ‘Pacifism disarms’ (Weekly Worker October 11). You say, near the end: “We must be militantly opposed to imperialism”, and that “war is not always wrong”.

Please define exactly what you are proposing. Should we all buy machine guns and attack banks? Or will this just be more of the same: ie, many of the victims in the WTC attacks were working class people? So, Mr Ford, how would you propose accomplishing your aims?

I have studied, believed in, and worked towards social justice - on local and global levels - all my life, and I’m almost 50. I’m a working member of my local food co-op; I recycle clothing; I grow much of my own food and share it with my community. Since I was in high school, I’ve been opposed to capitalism on principle because, by its very nature, its results are injustice. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. I marched against the Vietnam War, and I will march against the Bush-Blair war (today!).

I live in a region where the most thriving business is our own Farmer’s Market - with produce from many small, organic, local farms. When someone is in need - for example, their house burned down, or they can’t pay medical bills - we rally the community to their aid. I’ve seen this community transform itself over the past two decades through a bartering service; we even have our own (legal) currency which has been a model to other communities for over 10 years. It keeps our local economy healthy. We’ve driven out MacDonald’s, WalMart, and nuclear power plants. These are some examples of the persistent, non-violent, and determined work of ordinary people.

On a global level, I’ve seen the accomplishments of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, and Mother Theresa. If you think that your class war requires violent methods, then I’m sorry to say that you’ve weakened your argument. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, governments are always violent, but more progressive social change throughout history has been accomplished by the persistent demonstrations of ordinary people.

Although your way elusively promises a faster result (without giving us any definition of how this revolution of yours would be accomplished) - still I do not believe that there are any short cuts to enduring progress.

Violence begets violence. I hope you will consider the gradual changes that are possible within communities. We all make choices, and we can choose to run our enterprises cooperatively - so all share in the results of the work. We must continue our struggle with words, with marches, with our resistance to consumerism, with the choices we make on how to earn a living, with how much we share or not.

But if you tell me that your campaign requires killing, Mr Ford, count me out.

Jan Jorrin
USA

Cracking

I very much like your leading article ‘Pacifism disarms’ and your published letter on ‘Blunkett’s law’.

In the former, you state that the revolution of October 1917 (actually, a coup d’etat, the revolution being already underway since February of that year) “began to die as soon as it was born”. But will you then state now that the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been correct since 1915 in calling it a revolution, like the French and English ones before it, to liberate the forces of capitalism from the feudal system, and nothing to do with establishing socialism (communism), for which conditions were not ripe?

As Russia’s capitalist revolution, surely the 1917 revolution was a cracking success, just like the French and English ones before it?

AK Walker
e-mail

Rehash

As ever, Iain McKay is intelligent, ironic and relatively well informed (Letters, October 11). What worries me is communists and (for lack of a better word) anti-communists rehashing mistakes and quotations from the past rather than looking to the political issues of the present.

Most Bolsheviks have died. I don’t have precise numbers, but it is likely that the principal actors in the October revolution are gone, as are the conditions and occasional misconceptions under which they worked. For example, even if an illegal arm was a requirement to join the Comintern, that was in 1919. What matters now is whether (in this case) the CPGB has an illegal organisation which is “the real controlling body”. Communist practice now has to count for something in the debate, and anyone who’s had 15 minutes with CPGB members knows there aren’t shadowy ‘good communists’ behind the scenes running things.

“Why did [the Bolsheviks] reject democracy at every turn?” Excellent question, and I refer the readers to numerous histories of the period, each with their slant. Again, does the CPGB currently reject democracy at every turn? Hardly. Inside the (much maligned in anarchist circles) Socialist Alliance, they argue for more open structures, more decision-making from below, more participation and freedom of expression “at every turn”.

“Destruction of democracy occurred before the start of the civil war” (referring to the disbanding of the soviets) and thus had nothing to do with counterrevolutionary pressure. We on the left have a long way to go with a lot of our common goals before we need to worry about which of us was more likely to destroy democracy in 1918. Let’s go there together.

On a side note, Mawdsley’s history of the civil war explicitly takes issue with dating its inception with the Czech rising. He points out that this goes along with viewing it as a foreign intervention, whereas there were sporadic conflicts with White Guards (they didn’t just emerge after the Bolsheviks destroyed democracy) from the first moments of the revolution. Figes and Lincoln also give significant evidence of White regrouping in the Ukraine in the winter of 1917-1918.

One assumes Iain would prefer a revolution without a counterrevolution to deal with, or at least would deal with it (and its potential ‘internal’ allies) democratically. Good luck, and when the time comes I’ll fight alongside him.

In response to comrade Ford’s “democracy is our main weapon against capitalism, bureaucracy and counterrevolution” (Weekly Worker September 6), Iain says he should “tell that to the Bolsheviks”. This is actually a major point of common ground between the contemporary CPGB and contemporary anarchists. Iain’s account of anarchist democracy is (wonder of wonders) almost exactly what the CPGB argues for in the SA.

We can have a lot of fun arguing, but let’s not let it get in the way of working together where we can. Many of our anarchist comrades don’t see any reason to work with the Socialist Alliance, and that’s a pity. Recallable delegates, for example, either to national or local council structures, are far more likely to be put into place through political agitation around e-voting and new election technologies than through a social revolution in the next two years.

Some new technologies will enable rapid, accurate counts of positions and votes almost instantaneously, making recallable councillors and MPs a serious possibility. We could all work for that together, for example, as an extension of ‘democracy’ toward democracy. Unless of course we’ve got other things to do.

Mike Metelits
London

Conference call

Despite much fighting talk in the run-up to this year’s TUC, most of the trade union leaders have backed off from the campaign against privatisation of public services.

They claim that, in the light of the terrible events of September 11, and Blair’s war in Afghanistan, it is somehow not appropriate to keep up the momentum of the campaign. Yet New Labour’s privatisation drive continues - with the announcement of wholesale privatisation of services at cash-strapped Hackney council, and the imminent publication of adverts to attract bids from contractors for the largest hospital PFI so far undertaken, at the Barts and Royal London Trust.

We urge you to join us at the Unions Fightback conference on Saturday November 3 - a major rank and file conference to take the fight against privatisation forward. It will be from 11.30am to 5pm at St Mary’s Neighbourhood Centre, Upper Street/St Mary’s Path, London (tube: Angel or Highbury and Islington).

For more details, e-mail unions fightback@yahoo.com or call 07944 960103.

Unions Fightback
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