Weekly Worker 443 Thursday August 1 2002
Letters
Mud-slinging
A brief response to Mark Fischer’s ‘AWL divisions clear’ (Weekly Worker July 18).
Are there divisions in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty committees over the Socialist Alliance? I’m not aware of any politically significant ones. If there were divisions, the CPGB would have heard them expressed at our recent conference (which the CPGB attended), they would have been debated at our recent school (ditto), and the CPGB would have read about them in our documents and in our press.
Political people assess political divisions through political documents, speeches, etc. They do not assume, as Mark Fischer seems to, that political divisions exist according to some sort of plan he has in his head. And he should not try to work out political lines by attempting to sort out the AWL into different personality types (the so-called “economists” in the AWL are, apparently, rude; but people closer to the CPGB’s positions are typically more pleasant). Putting this sort of speculation into print - assertions not based on documents or political statements - amounts to mud-slinging.
There’s a nice example of Mark’s method in his article. He objects to me referring to a leader of the Socialist Workers Party as a “sectarian pig” (in a private conversation we had at our Ideas for Freedom event). What do I mean by this? Do I think this SWPer is an unpleasant man? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care much either. I can perfectly well believe he is kind to animals and picks up litter - but his personal manners are not what’s at issue.
No, what I mean is this: the SWP leaders - the whole group of them - are responsible for the SWP’s sterile, repressive internal regime, they have chopped up many of their client groups across the world, and they take political responsibility for the SWP’s continuing sectarian orientation to the labour movement.
Just because the SWP have made a turn to the Socialist Alliance and find it convenient and expedient to chat to members of the CPGB doesn’t mean all this has changed. They might wave and smile at Mark at Marxism, but they’re still the same people who force him to sell his paper outside in the rain. Of course it is true that organisations can change. Sometimes these transformations are radical. But we need to guard against wish-driven hopes replacing the underlying, continuing (and less pleasant) realities.
So a little less concentration on personalities and superficialities, please, and a little more on verified political reality and facts.
Mark Osborn
AWL
Gaza massacre
The Workers International Vanguard League condemns in the strongest possible terms the massacre of Tuesday July 23 in Gaza city by Israeli forces.
The imperialist forces and principally US monopoly capital and their state must take political responsibility for this massacre. They and the capitalist media have always criticised resistance from the working class as being the ‘ends justifies the means’ and undemocratic. Yet they reserve for themselves the right to execute at will to justify their supreme domination of the world. This is hypocrisy of the highest order. They are saying that all forms of terrorism are unjustified except if imperialism and its forces perpetrate this. This is the essence of monopoly capital’s ‘war on terrorism’.
This inhuman act comes hard on the heels of the United Nations decision to extend blanket amnesty to any US military force acting anywhere in the world. This decision shows the true role of the United Nations. The security council decision was unanimous, which shows that the real role of the UN is to ensure the complete subjugation of the world working classes to the forces of imperialism/monopoly capital. Massacre after massacre occurs in Palestine and the UN sits with folded arms. The logical result of the World Court’s refusal to try Sharon has directly led to more and more massacres. This latest massacre lies fully at the doors of the World Court and the UN. They have blood on their hands. This exposes the fallacy of calling for UN troops to enter the area to secure ‘peace’. Such troops would only be extensions of world imperialism and would in no way defend the interests of the Palestinian people.
Through the killing of the innocent, the Israeli state, US imperialism and the UN show contempt for the lives of the poor and the working class in general. In all wars waged by the capitalists, they use the working class and the poor as cannon fodder. Although we strongly disagree with the methods and aims of the Hamas, we condemn the execution of their military leader by the Israeli state. This execution is to fan the flames of inter-religious rivalry and to divert attention away from the real enemy - US and world imperialism-capitalism.
It is for the working class to deal with the Hamas leadership and their anti-worker methods. The working class and fellow poor should have no part of the quarrel between Hamas and the Israeli state. Indeed we should turn our anger against both forces. The Hamas forces are misguided in that they indiscriminately target the innocent, including workers and the poor, in the suicide bombings. Nationalist forces of Hamas or those of Zionism are but different sides of the same coin. Hamas rides on the back of the aspirations of the Palestinians, but for middle class interests. Hamas would accept capitalist interests on condition they accept the rule of an islamic government. Zionism is the reactionary force of world imperialism in the Middle East.
We call on working class forces everywhere, the American working class - the British working class, the jewish and Arab working class, indeed all workers and fellow poor - to unite against Zionist reaction, the Israeli state, US and world imperialism and against the ways and methods of Hamas.
WIVL
South Africa
Natives restless
Gibraltar is living up to its name and may be a rock around Blair’s neck. The Gibraltarians have long suspected that they are pawns in a game of Eurochess, but even pawns can make decisive moves.
Peter Caruana, the chief minister, has refused to attend talks where he could not participate fully and decisions would be made above his head. Hain claims publicly ‘not to understand’ his reasons but there can be no doubt that both he and Straw know full well. Caruana also held a protest march where 25,000 out of a population of 30,000 attended in support of his position. The locals understand what eludes the foreign minister. The attempts to threaten the Gibraltarians into surrendering to the bullying from Spain seems to have failed and Hain and Straw’s dishonest suggestions that there is a ‘pensions scam’ have rebounded.
Straw has announced that he is prepared to ‘share’ control of Gibraltar and even the naval base with Spain, although the ministry of defence may have different views and defence minister Geoff Hoon has already indicated that this is simply not viable.
In the preamble of the Gibraltar constitution there is a guarantee that HM government will not enter into any arrangements to transfer sovereignty contrary to the freely expressed wishes of the people of Gibraltar. So Caruana has called a referendum for October. Jack Straw is livid because he insists that the only referendum he will accept is one he calls. The fact that it’s the same people voting and the same people running it makes no difference - unless it produces the result he wants, it’s not democracy.
The governor, a colonial relic, who is supposed to represent the people of Gibraltar and is increasingly seen as the representative of the foreign and Commonwealth office, has gone on holiday to avoid the very noisy but otherwise peaceful protests outside his residence by the Voice of Gibraltar group. They are raising more than their voice - with car horns, whistles and bells. The only way he will have peace is when the sellout is stopped.
Although Straw states in parliament that ‘gunboat diplomacy’ is over and he will give away Gibraltar whatever its people think, in a clear example of double standards, Spain is not prepared to share an uninhabited rock a stone’s throw away from the Moroccan coast and sent in its gunboats, submarines, helicopters and the special forces to evict six Moroccans with a rowing boat.
The victorious Spanish troops received as much media attention as the Falklands war, but thankfully nobody was killed - only the goats of Perejil, aka Leila, may have been frightened by all the fuss.
In Gibraltar, however, the natives are still restless.
Jim Watt
Gibraltar
Enduring Paine
Please accept warm greetings and best wishes on behalf of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. While doing a web-search for Thomas Paine-related sites, I happened upon the article in the Weekly Worker (April 18).
First, congratulations on a really excellent survey of Paine and his life. The essay is, in my personal opinion, one of the more accurate that I have encountered. Very exciting to see Paine handled in a fair, accurate and enthusiastic manner. The three are rarely found in combination.
Paine, however, did not die at his farm in New Rochelle, NY. Rather, he died in what is now Greenwich Village, NY at a location that is now Marie’s Crisis Cafe - on Grove Street, I think it is. That seems to be the only major factual error in the piece.
Just parenthetically, I am always amused at the wide range of people that claim Paine as their own. A few examples:
- Atheists: deeply revered and touted, although Paine himself was a deist.
- Deists: he’s considered a founder.
- Unitarian universalists: considered a founder and a virtual ‘saint’ or apostle of religious liberty.
- Social security system: Paine’s Agrarian justice is posted on their website as a founding document of the system.
- Conservative Republicans: everyone from Reagan on down the line have quoted him and even the very staunchest, hard-shell conservatives lionise Paine.
- Libertarians: ditto.
- Democrats: thoroughly convinced that they own him, rather than the Republicans. After all, they reason, we are the party of integration, education, civil rights, labour law, women’s rights, animal rights, and all the many causes Paine espoused.
- Communists: your site claims him as your “own”.
It runs the gamut from ‘infidels’ to believers and from fascists to communists and all points in between. There’s hardly anyone that you can say that about, like you can Tom Paine.
Ken Burchell
www.thomaspaine.org
Historical materialism
I want to take a moment to bring my website on historical materialism to your attention (http://groups.msn.com/JasonSmithcom). I think it will be of considerable interest to you and your readers.
The tab marked ‘Part I - the periodization of history’ - is a super short course bringing the overall view of human prehistory and history to party members in a nutshell. Part II - the dialectics of history’ - covers the same ground, but deals in depth with: causality and process in sociocultural evolution in primitive communism; the servitude epoch; the transitional stages between these two epochs; and finally the current period of transitional stages we call socialism.
Currently a large typescript is being scanned for purposes of printing in January 2003. I call it Capital volume 5.
Jason Smith
email
