Weekly Worker 415 Thursday January 17 2002
Letters
Lies?
Like it or not, the Weekly Worker is notorious amongst certain sections of the left for misrepresenting the views of comrades. Journalists at the paper have recognised that such misrepresentation has happened in the past, but insist that it was not done maliciously. Comrades have been encouraged to write in to set the record straight, with promises that apologies will be forthcoming when merited.
Regrettably, all too many comrades refuse to accept this protestation of innocence, choosing instead to boycott the paper and encourage treating its supporters as lepers, this being a particularly serious problem in Scotland. That is why I consider it essential to be particularly careful. Read in this context, James Mallory’s article on John Maclean could not have been any less helpful (Weekly Worker December 20). James’ bid to justify his article from my criticisms of it have only made matters worse (Letters, January 10).
I have no appetite to engage in protracted polemics over this matter because (for one thing) I have been very impressed by the consistently high quality of most of his articles. I hope we can both quickly move on to other matters. But a word of advice, James: when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
You have completely missed each and every point I was trying to make. Firstly, you think I tried to challenge the dual authorship of the articles in Scottish Socialist Voice because I thought this would be a personal attack on Dave Sherry. Nonsense. I simply wanted to stress the lunacy of placing Dave Sherry and Gerry Cairns into a single all-embracing ‘left nationalist’ category. I tried to demonstrate just how ridiculous this was. Unfortunately, the editor saw to it that the substantial part of my attempt to explain all this was cut out. That is his right as editor of the paper.
But, if I am to be deprived of a reasonable attempt to explain why Cairns and Dave are not two peas in a pod, but on key fundamentals of the national question actual polar opposites, then I don’t see why he should allow letters to be printed criticising me for giving an insufficiently brief biography of these two very different individuals. In parentheses, how does James know Dave Sherry can be criticised for allowing his article to be cut by Alan McCombes? How does he know that this permission was given any more than Peter Manson received my permission to cut my contribution?
Dave Sherry wants to fight to stop any split in the trade unions along nationalist lines. Cairns, by contrast, strove to keep Dave and the rest of his Socialist Workers Party comrades out of the SSP for, amongst other reasons, insisting that this was non-negotiable! Everything Dave has always argued counters the words that were put in his mouth by James in his article. Dave has always argued that it was a tragedy for John Maclean personally that he did not join the CPGB, and that his stubborn refusal to join deprived the party of potentially its greatest leader.
If James had read Dave’s article carefully, he could have deduced that this is still Dave’s view. For instance, Dave wrote: “Lenin and Trotsky saw him as Britain’s outstanding revolutionary leader ... The Communist Party of Great Britain was launched belatedly in 1920. Lenin saw Maclean as the authentic voice of the British revolution, and wanted him to lead the new party” (my emphasis Scottish Socialist Voice November 30). Dave notes Maclean’s refusal to join, but nothing in the article suggests that he has budged one iota from the position he has always argued: Maclean was seriously misguided in not joining.
If James is asserting that Dave has undergone some road-to-Damascus conversion, then he has yet to produce any evidence for this. Until he does, I will continue to assume that he sucked his theories out of thin air, and is simply not big enough to apologise for his sectarian misrepresentation of this SSV journalist.
Why do I think it so important that a retraction is given? It is precisely in order to demonstrate to potential buyers of the paper (sincere, hardworking socialist activists in the Scottish Socialist Party and the Socialist Alliance) that the supporters of the Weekly Worker are not deliberately shit-stirring. Additionally, I have fought for the SWP to participate in left unity initiatives with the rest of the left in Scotland and the rest of the UK (and internationally) long, long before the formation of the Scottish Socialist Alliance in February 1996, never mind the SSP. I fought to get them into the SSP with every bit as much energy as Gerry Cairns and his Scottish Republican Socialist Movement group fought to keep them out.
However, since they climbed on board I have found (much to my surprise, and regret) that, on the issues that have divided their members from the rest of the SSP, I have had to take a stand against them. Their members (probably even more so than most of the rest of the left in the SSP and SA) have had an historic tendency to take such criticisms personally. They still need to learn to drop their knee-jerk ‘if you are not for us, you are against us’ approach. I know that potentially they have enormous strengths to bring to the SSP (and the SA), much of which we can already see.
But they need to be unnecessarily alienated from CPGB supporters like a hole in the head. This is not in their interests any more than it is in ours. You simply got it wrong, James. For the good of the CPGB as a whole, please be big enough to admit your mistake.
Tom Delargy
CPGB supporter, Paisley
Vote no to euro
I see that confusion still reigns at the Weekly Worker over the EU and the introduction of the euro. According to Eddie Ford (January 10), the single currency is a nasty business (which it is) and a vote in favour of it (in the event of a referendum) is unthinkable. Fair enough. On the other hand, he says, a lot of nasty people will be voting against the euro and real communists cannot be seen dead voting the same way as them - so the answer is abstention. Where’s the politics in that?
Can I offer the Weekly Worker an alternative way of deciding which way to vote on this issue: ie, on the basis of what is in the best interest of the working class? On the basis of that question the answer is clear enough: we should vote no.
The EU of Maastricht, and the single European currency which flows from it, remains the central project of the European bourgeoisie, aimed at reshaping European capital and thereby increasing the exploitation of the working class in order to compete more effectively with its international rivals. The aim of the left should be the defeat of the single currency in a referendum and therefore the disruption of a hostile project.
Of course the bourgeoisie in Britain is famously split on the EU, with its most xenophobic wing opposing the euro on a nationalist platform. The Communist Party of Britain and the Socialist Labour Party oppose it on a similar basis - although they also recognise the attack on welfare involved in EMU.
The idea, however, that those of us who don’t give a damn for the pound and oppose the euro from an internationalist standpoint should abstain from voting against an anti-working class project because others will also vote against it from a completely different political standpoint doesn’t make much sense.
Eddie Ford tries to square the circle by calling for international solidarity. Yes, we do have to fight for international solidarity - many of us have been for a long time. But that is the case with or without the EU or the single currency and is made more difficult with the euro in place. In any case neutrality on the employers’ main project against the working class is not a good standpoint from which to promote international solidarity.
Alan Thornett
International Socialist Group
Workers Power, innit?
I’m sure I speak for many readers of the Weekly Worker when I say how pleased I am to see that Workers Power has decided to allow people to actually join its ranks again. For a while there I thought WP might be full up.
A regular feature of all left papers are the ‘subscribe/join up’ boxes. It is true that in these e-days of high speed cyber-communication, these cut-out-and-post boxes are used much less frequently to apply for membership or for more information about a group, particularly by the younger generation. They remain indispensable for subs and donations, however, with the overwhelming bulk of this commerce still conducted by snail-mail, complete with good old-fashioned cheques and written orders.
Now back in January of last year, WP - like the rest of the left - still featured a range of methods of contacting it - telephone, email and postal address. It had a ‘Join us!’ box, a subscription form and an appeal for donations to support WP candidates standing for the Socialist Alliance in the forthcoming general election. All standard stuff.
During the course of the year, a progressive wasting disease seemed to set in. By the July 2001 issue, the postal address and telephone number had been relegated to subordinate appearances in two boxes about other topics, while the WP website address and various e-addresses featured heavily throughout its pages.
On one level, fair enough, you might think. After all, the Weekly Worker has reported that the bulk of Communist Party queries and requests for information come via the web. Featuring the WP site and various email addresses might therefore make sense. The really curious innovation was the so-called “Workers Power network”, an organisational add-on that seemingly replaced the ability to individually subscribe to the paper.
As befits politics in a “changing world”, the ‘network’ blurb breathlessly informed us that you could now “sign up for [WP’s] regular email Newswire and order 10 copies of Workers Power each month (£5)”. Quite what I should now do to get a sub as someone who has no interest in selling WP was not elucidated. The implication seemed to be that in a “changing world”, dozy old dodos like me were being left behind in the mad rush to get bulk orders of WP into feverishly eager young hands. Yeah, right.
Worse was to come, however. At least the ‘Network’ wheeze seemed to offer you some sort of organised relationship with the group, as you were promised (threatened?) that WP would send you “a full listing of our activities and [invites] to regular local discussion meetings”. By September of last year, the ‘Network’ advert had disappeared. In fact, there was no detailed information anywhere in the paper on how to join, subscribe to or get active with WP. The November issue was the nadir, however, with the postal address relegated to one tiny line of text in the top corner of page 3, the organisation’s telephone number missing altogether and no information whatsoever on subscriptions - not even where you could call to take extra copies to sell. Nowt.
The first issue of 2002 lurches back in the direction of sanity. In again (in exactly the same format, on exactly the same page) are our old friends, the fund drive, ‘subscribe’ and ‘join us’ boxes. But what was all that nonsense about last year? Two scenarios present themselves - both equally dire.
First, that the ‘now’, ‘happening’ young thingies in the WP office came to believe that stuff like addresses, telephone numbers, subs and members was all a little old hat for the new generation the group has been so assiduously - and unsuccessfully - courting. After all, the anarchists - the trend that the WP have been clumsily aping in the anti-capitalist movement - seem to do quite well for themselves organising almost exclusively on the web. So if it works for them, why not for WP? If indeed WP is now living and working mainly in cyber-space, we can only guess at its successes, as the hits-counter has been removed from its website - coincidentally enough just about the time the Communist Party’s counter raced past the WP total.
Second, and even sadder, perhaps these features of the paper were simply missed out by accident. Then - embarrassingly - it wasn’t noticed for months because ... well ... no one really ever writes to WP or subs much these days. The brief appearance and then disappearance of a painfully anaemic letters’ page last year would seem to indicate as much, but I think we should be told, WP comrades. Was the strange case of the disappearing boxes of 2001 a case of political perspectives or office cock-up?
Ceri Rhys
London
