Weekly Worker 432 Thursday May 16 2002
Letters
WSV collapse
What a contradiction. On the one hand the CPGB campaigns for a paper for the Socialist Alliance in England, while its correspondent in Wales has made a major contribution to the destruction of Welsh Socialist Voice, which has now collapsed, thanks to his widely inaccurate article in Weekly Worker (May 2).
Now that all the non-Socialist Workers Party members of the editorial board have resigned because of their perception that the SWP is somehow engaged in sabotaging the paper - thanks mainly to Cameron Richard’s selective quoting of the national council meeting - I can much more clearly understand why the majority of the SA in England are extremely wary of letting the CPGB get access to an official publication.
I was the instigator and mover of the resolution that established the WSA publication. I welcomed the enthusiasm of the editorial board. The first two issues of WSV have been impressive in terms of layout and diversity of content. There was a good feeling of cooperation among the members of the editorial board, whatever their political viewpoint. The report of the national council meeting in the Weekly Worker has been, by accident or design, perfectly timed to accentuate the elements of self-doubt that had afflicted some members of the editorial board following the slightly disappointing sales of the first issue.
To correct the two obvious fallacies, firstly the conclusive feeling of the national council meeting was to commend highly the editorial board on the two issues of WSV and this was the resolution that was passed unanimously. The only rider that was attached to this was a request for the editorial board to meet before the publication of each issue - a problem because of the geographical spread of the members and the poor road system linking north and south Wales.
The second fallacy is the relationship of the SWP to WSV. The vast majority of the first edition’s sales - at least 70% - were due to the SWP.
Finally, if the WSA/SA project is to continue, then all sections need to show responsibility and approach disagreements from the point of view of mutual respect for other groups and traditions. Widely inaccurate reporting and destructive criticism won’t get us anywhere.
Richard Morse
Newport SWP
Argentina
Jack Conrad introduced his two cents on the debate over Argentina by indicating he had no intention of taking sides between comrades Chris Pike and Ian Donovan (Letters, May 9). I doubt if either will have identified much even-handedness in what followed. You ought not to be so coy, Jack. Far from criticising you for taking sides, I just wish you had intervened before now. Comrades have a right to know where others (especially their recognised and elected leaders) stand on such important issues.
I have for a couple of months been trying to budge the CPGB membership into adopting a majority line on Argentina, with no success whatsoever. Most comrades remain oblivious to any need for adopting such a line. Many have denounced the very idea of doing so, arguing that this would be to ape the sectarianism of the League for Revolutionary Communist International, International Socialist Tendency, Committee for a Workers’ International, United Secretariat, etc. I find this attitude bewildering. Surely the CPGB is no less committed to reforging the Communist International than any of the above.
What distinguishes our internationalist perspective from theirs is that we want to fuse the revolutionary left in this country, and the respective internationals of these groups, rather than to set up one of our own. Additionally, we recognise the necessity of appropriate factional rights to keep the new international robust enough not to fracture over and over again. Just because the CPGB could (should) adopt a majority line on the Argentine revolution does not mean that this line (or any other) would be held up as a shibboleth used to justify a sectarian refusal to unite the revolutionary left in Britain, Argentina or globally. Nor does it mean that CPGB members who reject the majority line would find themselves gagged.
While I won’t repeat those arguments deployed with such commendable concision by Jack in his first foray into this debate (I hope it will not be his last), I would like to add this. In my opinion, the key weakness of Ian’s position is his failing to identify any role for a communist workers’ party in his perspectives for the Argentine revolution. While Chris Pike concluded his article with long, well argued polemical passages, explaining the necessity of the two most important revolutionary organisations fusing and exploiting the greater attractive power this would give them to draw a mass of radicalised workers from other, less important organisations (and none) into their new party, Ian’s list of demands implied that workers could emancipate themselves without even the embryo of such a party.
That is wrong. Very, very seriously wrong.
Tom Delargy
Paisley
Sinn Féin road
I sometimes read your paper for its high-quality information on British politics. However, as a member of Sinn Féin, I was shocked to see a very poor article on your website by a Jon Anderson on the subject of the Irish election (May 9). He is a member of an organisation called the International Socialists of Ireland - a group I have never heard of.
In the article he slams SF as following a line of “amorphous populism” which has allowed our “candidates in inner-city Dublin to present a leftist profile, while in conservative rural areas like Donegal or Kerry they can tack to the right”. He offers no sign of justification for this smear - I would just like to say that our candidates in all constituencies would have an ideological similarity - generated by a similar experience at the hands of both the British and Irish state apparatuses. However, unlike some sectarian morons we don’t always go out of our way to alienate ourselves from local people (from whom we derive our support and from whom our activists are part).
Furthermore, if Jon Anderson honestly believes that the people in Kerry and Donegal are rightwing by nature, then he is badly misled - perhaps he doesn’t understand the depth of deprivation which has visited parts of these counties under the prolonged bourgeois governments in power since the 1920s. His attack on the case of Donegal - which I know well - is completely out of line. Furthermore, I would be confident that our position and activism in North Kerry would be similar. Let him substantiate his allegations!
Jon’s reportage on the moral frenzy among the denizens of Dublin 4 (the self-appointed liberal establishment) and among the sectarian left over the possibility of a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin coalition is somewhat dated at this stage. Bertie Ahern has made it clear that Fianna Fáil won’t rely on Sinn Féin for support, and Gerry Adams (on behalf of Sinn Féin) has indicated that our TDs will support any government on the basis of how they fulfil our manifesto commitments. I would suggest that if Jon wants to add something more original to your paper then he could do worse than reading through the various party manifestos and commenting on their potential impact and perhaps more specifically on their congruency with economic realities.
His final allegation was that, “Martin McGuinness at education and Bairbre de Brún at health have been foremost in implementing neoliberal policies”. I suppose in this he is referring to their departments’ utilisation of PFI/PPP schemes to fund capital projects. Perhaps it has escaped Mr Anderson’s attention, but the northern executive has a very limited budget - determined by the Barnett formula which underprovides the Six Counties in terms of relative need - not to mention new Labour’s continuance of Thatcherite underfunding of the public sector. In addition to this current assessment of public finance, the Six Counties has suffered from extended periods of discrimination and the conflict has played a role in reducing the quality of health, education and transportation infrastructures.
In these circumstances, and without recourse to any departmental or executive borrowing facilities, our ministers had to utilise PFI to fund projects - which in many cases local people were crying out for. I suppose that Jon would have preferred Sinn Féin ministers to not deliver even the small bit they have in terms of capital investment. Or perhaps he thinks we should be in opposition within the north - allowing the UUP, the DUP and the SDLP to carve up control of our society between them. I’m afraid the nationalist people in the north have had too much of powerlessness and we need to take whatever freedom we can get and use it to push for more.
Obviously, the strategic vision of the Sinn Féin peace strategy eludes comrade Anderson, who can’t tell the difference between fundamental and tactical objectives and strategies. Such undialectical thinking is, unfortunately, what we have came to expect from ultra-leftist groups and individuals. Indeed, it is my belief that the inability of many on the left to actually address the immediate grievances of working class and rural communities, whilst retaining a disciplined focus on the bigger picture, is what has sidelined the left to date. It is precisely this which Jon Anderson seeks to criticise!
As for Sinn Féin being the most unscrupulous party in Ireland, I guess that’s also what the liberals, Mensheviks and ultra-lefts would have said about Lenin. Determination, discipline and not a little strategic thinking are required to be successful - as a party, and increasingly as a people, we know where we are going and we will get there, irrespective of whatever any self-appointed commentator says.
David O’Toole
email
In attendance
We noted the article by Marcus Ström (‘Unions take the lead’ Weekly Worker May 9). It commented on participation by “‘Turkish and Kurdish organisations” in the London May Day event, stating that, according to “reliable” information, some groups did not take part as a reaction to the heightened SWP presence: “While this may point to a truth about the SWP’s method, it mainly underlines both the ‘anti-Trotskyist’ sectarianism of many of the revolutionary Turkish groups based in our country and their failure to view themselves as an integral part of the British working class movement. It was therefore welcome that the MLKP and DHKC did join the now mainly British demonstration.”
If you thought groups from Turkey were not going to participate, would you have tried to persuade them to take part? How “reliable” was your information as a matter of fact? Besides ourselves and the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, we noted the following organisations from our community taking part in the May Day demonstration: TKP (ML) and TKP/ML (Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist), TIKB (Union of Revolutionary Communists of Turkey), PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, but they have recently changed their name), the Day-Mer centre, a Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path) contingent and a few other groups.
The Turkish-language London press said the TKP Iscinin Sesi (Communist Party of Turkey Workers’ Voice) was also present, but we will have to take their word for it because we have not seen this organisation in years. On the evening of May Day, BBC TV showed about 30 seconds of an interview with a TIKB supporter in Trafalgar Square. In short, the full panoply of groups from Turkey and Kurdistan was present and correct on May Day. It is notable that Ström does not mention any allegedly missing group by name.
It is in fact inconceivable that the left from Turkey and Kurdistan would not march on May Day just because there were Trotskyists marching as well. We ourselves will happily march with islamists and with Trotskyists on May Day, yet we are neither islamist nor Trotskyist. We do not respond to the tekbir by shouting Allah Akbar and we do not curse the Soviet Union or Cuba, as the Trotskyists do.
We are a little puzzled as to what being an “integral part of the British working class” means. May Day is international workers’ day. Our presence at a London May Day event has nothing to do with whether or not we see ourselves as part of the “British working class movement”.
The fact that British leftwingers seem to be taking May Day more seriously can only be welcomed, and it gave us a chance to distribute leaflets in English on our struggle against fascism and its prisons in Turkey, despite being banned in the UK and now the entire European Union as well. Your readers should know that the DHKP-C came out to march and honour our martyrs on May Day, despite being proscribed.
DHKC
London
Capital call
Charlie Pottins suggested your use of the lower case ‘j’ in ‘jew’ and ‘jewish’ may be making a point about Jews not being a nation (Letters, May 9).
I have shared his irritation at this usage and have also been musing on its rationale, but came to a different conclusion. Since you give ‘Zionist’ an upper case ‘z’, but ‘islam’ and ‘islamist’ a lower case ‘i’, it would seem you are identifying Jewishness with religion - something secular Jews would dispute.
A suggested solution: Yiddish, language of east European Jews (and of the socialist Jewish Workers Bund), uses no capitalisation at all. That way you create broyges (offence) to no-one ... or everyone.
Or else, give us back our capital ‘j’!
Myra Woolfson
Jewish Socialists’ Group
Engage
I was interested in your comments on the Independent Working Class Association’s election results (Weekly Worker May 9), and those from the Socialist Alliance national council. It seems that their results and indeed their whole approach has simply been dismissed as “reactionary” by the left. Maybe you are right, but you do not explain why. Certainly I have found nothing reactionary on the couple of IWCA websites I have visited.
You are going down a very lonely path if you condemn everyone concerned about anti-social behaviour and crime. Taking this view, the SA would certainly have to write off 95% of those on my estate, regardless of age, race or gender.
Certainly for those who live in the leafier parts of London or in steel-gated yuppie ghettos the ever present fear of crime has more to do with a siege mentality than actual experience. However, for those of us who live on the capital’s crumbling housing estates the fear of crime is a reality, usually based on bitter personal experience. The fact is that a pensioner on a run-down estate is far more likely to be mugged for her pension than an estate agent is to be ‘carjacked’.
Are we to just ignore this fact because it sits uncomfortably with the left’s orthodox view of the world? Yes, I’m sure that in a socialist society, crime would be greatly reduced, but, with the Socialist Alliance as of yet without a single councillor in the country, I would venture that this kind of society is still a couple of months off yet.
Surely those on the left who disagree with the IWCA’s approach have a duty to engage with them and debate these issues openly, while offering alternatives.
Clive Best
London
BNP opportunity
My parents live in the “racist capital of Britain”: Burnley (Daily Express May 4).
In a town of deep-seated economic and social problems people are looking for a programme, some alternative. Truth, even in a class war, is a casualty. Those summer race riots were actually more about contending drugs gangs than skin colour. It was the raw edge of capitalism, where the true nature of competition was exposed. Election returns reflect dissatisfaction with a moribund council that has hidden behind the name ‘Labour’ for generations.
The leafy suburbs perceive high council taxes (true) for little return. Rather, the spending seems to be disproportionately in Asian areas on Asian concerns. The veracity of this perception is not the issue. In truth, those of Asian origin have brought new life to parts of the town that were run down and near derelict when I left 30 years ago. These are areas and people who desperately need redistribution of wealth - but so does the whole town, so does society.
Here grow the roots of racism - in the manure of poverty, unfairness and a real sense of powerlessness. The majority who live in what is described by the media so blithely as ‘leafy suburbs’ are, in the vast majority, workers and retired workers who have been lucky enough to scrape together something a little more than the bare subsistence that characterises to many towns like Burnley. The success of the BNP (such as it is) is an opportunity: it signals widespread contempt for the established political processes.
The battle must not be a negative one of stopping the BNP. What is needed is rather a positive struggle for democracy. To be democracy there has to be a real alternative for people to support, not the false alternatives of the three shades of a single polity - Labour, Tory and Lib-Dem.
Don Allen
email
Wrong, James
James Mallory wrote: “The attentive reader may think that this is precisely the sort of organisation that SPEW, which was a constant critic of the Socialist Alliance over such ‘community campaigns’, would consider standing aside for. Apparently not if you have a sitting councillor” (Weekly Worker May 9).
I think you’ll find that all three councillors were up for election in Telegraph Hill - the Socialist Party stood two, the Local Education Action for Parents (Leap) one. Both SP and Leap candidates endorsed each other.
Actually it’s you who are not very attentive. A correction is in order.
Ken Scott
email
