Weekly Worker 445 Thursday August 29 2002
Letters
No AWL split
Thanks to ‘Ideas for freedom’, Communist University and the pages of the Weekly Worker, I now have a much better idea how things stand between the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the CPGB.
You seem to believe that we are divided on the question of the Socialist Alliance and over the CPGB. There are certainly differences of emphasis and assessment and an ongoing debate over the SA, and on the CPGB I would say we are still at the exploratory stage. But your hoped-for split just ain’t going to happen.
What is all this about “the pro-party AWLers” (Marcus Ström Weekly Worker August 22)? The AWL is 100% ‘pro-party’. We are for the building of a proletarian revolutionary party. That’s what we’re about, the reason for our existence. We’re not a drinking club or a dating agency (more’s the pity). How could you doubt that we’re all ‘pro-party’?
That’s not, of course, what’s meant. This is just a reformulation of the ‘economist/political’ divide. This is just an attempt to conjure into existence a faction with your politics within the AWL. You have every right (indeed a political duty) to try and convince AWL members, individually and as a group, of your politics. But you can’t just co-opt them into your faction by sleight of hand, without asking them.
Marcus is clearly trying to imply support for your ‘SA party’ project within the AWL - which does not exist. You know what our conference policy is, and it doesn’t include ‘SA party’: in fact it explicitly argues against it. If indeed there were ‘pro-SA party’ elements within the AWL, they should be arguing for us to change our policy to one more in line with yours - and they’re not.
After the Communist University session on the SA paper, I circulated my assessment of what we, the AWL, agree on: “A broad SA paper that could unite and mobilise substantial forces outside us and [the CPGB] - we’d be very much in favour of that, but realistically it is not on the cards at this time. What their actual proposal comes down to is a merged Weekly Worker/Solidarity (they have offered to give up the Weekly Worker; we are not in a position to publish two papers; the ‘independents’ do not represent anything substantial politically). A joint paper on that narrow basis is really a proposal to converge the two organisations, or for chaos and factionalism (which those of us who remember would never wish to repeat). A very different discussion is necessary for the merging of two tendencies than is suggested by a ‘joint unofficial paper’.
“We have a lot more to lose in closing down Solidarity (they already have all their eggs in the SA basket; we’re involved in lots of other work which could be disrupted by the change). We have a very different conception from them as to what a paper is, represented by the different papers we actually produce. We don’t want to sell the Weekly Worker or even a hybrid Weekly Worker/Solidarity. They haven’t really made a case for what benefits we’d derive to compensate for the disruption. There are enormous differences in political culture, strategic orientation and understanding of the role of the party between our two organisations.”
Nobody in the AWL has come back to dispute this summary. Inertia perhaps, but I would expect the leading comrades to point me to the error of my ways - they’ve never been shy of doing so in the past. If the situation were as fraught as you suggest, would we have sent to Communist University comrades whose views span the whole spectrum of stances toward the SA, from Tom Cashman to Richard Bayley? Perhaps as ‘semi-anarchists’ we couldn’t exercise the necessary discipline. Or maybe it was a really Machiavellian double-bluff to prove how united we are.
Instead of, like Le Carré’s cold war Russia-watchers, trying to discern splits and factions from whispered conversation and luring us into drunken indiscretions (though I’m very much in favour of that particular approach), can we have a political debate? We are not the SWP.
Let’s continue joint initiatives on areas we do agree on (Palestine, political islam, the euro) and set up a structured discussion to clarify underlying differences.
“Sean suggested we debate Afghanistan,” Marcus quipped in response to a proposal for debate, as if it were a nonsensical, angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin suggestion. If Mark Osborn believes you’re still “90% Stalinist” it’s probably due to that attitude. We think Afghanistan is the 20th century in a nutshell: it contains all the issues in a concentrated and extreme form. But we’re not Afghan fetishists. It could be Poland, Spain 1938, China - you name it. You can’t just pretend the years 1925-91 didn’t happen. There has to be some accounting.
It’s not about name-calling. The fact is, our very different conceptions of the party are derived from what we have learned (or not) of the fate of Lenin’s party and the ravages on the working class internationally when the name ‘communism’ was hijacked by anti-working class predators. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim the name and the flag and the hammer and sickle and not address the war crimes against our class committed under those symbols.
Gerry Byrne
AWL
Anti-semitic?
Comrade Clive Bradley makes a valiant attempt to defend his - and many Alliance for Workers’ Liberty comrades’ - assertion that the left is guilty of a “form of anti-semitism” (Letters, August 22). However, his letter ultimately adds little substance to a charge that is, in essence, a figment of the febrile imagination of certain comrades within the AWL.
For comrade Bradley, what we are debating is “whether it is acceptable that sections of the left display reactionary attitudes towards jews”. It is assumed a priori that such attitudes exist in the first place. Surely it is a truth of the utmost banality that reactionary and chauvinistic attitudes are intolerable within our movement. But where is comrade Bradley’s proof that the left holds “reactionary attitudes towards jews” - not just Israeli jews, but jews in general? Where are the quotes from Socialist Worker displaying “reactionary attitudes towards jews”? I scanned the comrade’s letter and found none. I also scoured the AWL’s Two nations, two states pamphlet in vain. Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe the comrade can enlighten us. But I suspect not, because no such material exists.
Tellingly, for comrade Bradley defining the difference between Hamas and the Socialist Workers Party is reduced to a matter of psychology. Apolitical eye-wash. Comrade Bradley’s drift from concrete politics into psychobabble is illuminating only in that it reveals the startling weakness of his political case. If the question is approached politically then the difference between the two is, of course, easy to divine. It is not to be found in different psychological profiles, but in differing political programmes.
Much play is made of a tendency on the left to draw parallels between the actions of the Israeli government and those of the Nazis. Undoubtedly it is true that these parallels do appear in left propaganda. The specific merits of such a historical comparison are questionable both on an theoretical and political level as well. But, however clumsy and inaccurate such comparisons may be, they scarcely prove the existence of rampant anti-semitism on the left.
Along with holocaust parallels, the other factor that damns the left in the eyes of comrade Bradley is its denial of “collective [ie, national] rights” to Israeli jews. At least we are getting to the nub of the issue. For the charge of anti-semitism is based mainly on a reaction against the left’s attitude towards Israel. We can both agree that a genuine problem exists here. But diagnoses of the cause of the disease are totally different. Comrade Bradley would have us believe that the cause is an irrational prejudice held by the left against jews. This is clearly not the case.
Israeli jews are not the only group that are denied collective or national rights by the left, as comrade Ian Donovan has already pointed out and, indeed, as comrade Bradley himself acknowledges. He admits that the left’s “hostility to the jews is not worse than towards other groups” but then, confusingly, states that “implicit attitudes towards jews which exist on the left are not common towards other groups, loyalists notwithstanding”.
Looking at the SWP’s thinking on the national question, its denial of Israeli jews’ collective rights is easy to explain. As I have pointed out before in these pages, the SWP possesses a totally one-sided understanding of national rights. For it, the right to self-determination is “confined to those movements whose demands for national independence bring them into conflict with imperialism, and whose victory will therefore undermine imperialism” (‘Programmatic confusion’ Weekly Worker April 18). It is this impoverished ‘Leninism’ that leads the SWP to deny the national rights of both the Israeli jews and the British-Irish. Looked at through this prism, the SWP’s attitude towards Israel becomes much more understandable - not as a product of an irrational prejudice held against jews, but as a product of its programmatic weakness.
It is a great shame that certain AWL comrades insist on peddling the myth of an ‘anti-semitic left’. Seemingly, having found what they feel to be a magnificent stick with which to beat the SWP, some comrades are determined not to let the facts get in the way of a good argument. But this disarms a serious critique of the majority of the left’s programmatic weaknesses on this question. It alienates our potential audience and it directs our fire, away from concrete programmatic faults, towards ‘anti-semitic’ straw men.
James Mallory
email
Double standards
Clive Bradley of the AWL is correct to upbraid Ian Donovan for his invalid comparison between Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and Nazi Germany’s pre-1939 policies towards jews.
But his (correct) insistence that Israeli policies towards the Palestinian are not genocidal is completely undermined by his organisation’s insistence that Serbian policies towards the Kosovan Albanians were “genocidal”. That the Kosovan Albanians suffered systematic discrimination at the hands of the Yugoslav authorities is undeniable; what the Palestinians have suffered since 1948 at the hands of the Israeli state amounts to much the same thing. Yet for the AWL, one was genocidal, the other is not.
It is thus hardly legitimate for comrade Bradley to accuse people, as he does, of having double standards.
Paul Flewers
London
Debating Labour
At a public meeting called on July 23 by the London district of the Communist Party of Britain, Liz Davies - former Islington Labour councillor and member of the Labour Party’s national executive committee; current chair of the Socialist Alliance - and Rob Griffiths, CPB general secretary, debated ‘Labour and the unions: what future for the link?’ with a capacity audience in the small Conway Hall.
Rob said that the Labour Party is the mass electoral party of the working class. It gets millions of votes and holds political office. The question is, how do we win the Labour Party back for progressive policies? There was no realistic alternative at election times. Rob was not opposed to the current trade union tactic of keeping more political fund money for direct union use or for sponsoring union-friendly left Labour MPs, while paying the minimum in affiliation fees to the party. He did not approve of union branches exercising local democratic control and fragmenting the funds.
Liz wants to democratise the unions’ political funds. Why should unions feed the hand that bites them, she said, referring to Labour’s privatisation policies. The Labour Party is getting a lot of money from big business for favours given. It is not possible to change the party back. Working class members are leaving in droves or becoming inactive. Young people won’t join. New Labour activists run the party. The constituencies are anti-radical. The democratic structures of the party have been shut down. Members cannot put motions directly. There are no favours for the unions. The representatives of New Labour run the unions rather than the other way. Conference motions do not affect policy.
From the floor, I pointed out that the working class had lost out on all political fronts over the past 50 years because it had no political party to act on its behalf. As workers, notably on the railways, were betrayed by Labour, they left the Labour Party. What advice would Rob and Liz give to those workers?
I went on to say that individual Labour Party members no longer needed to be union members. The previous Saturday’s Socialist Campaign Group conference, ‘After New Labour’, was filled with the usual bunch of optimistic windbags. Why were they not setting up any machinery to reclaim Labour for progressive politics, if they believed this possible?
Liz and Rob replied to the wide-ranging discussion which revealed that Labour Party membership and votes are only going up in Tory areas. Liz did not take up my question. Presumably she feels that the Socialist Alliance is not yet ready for ordinary working class people to join. Rob actually said, in so many words, that workers let down by Labour should join the Communist Party or the Young Communist League.
Suppose said workers are not communists and don’t want to become communists, Rob. What should they join?
Ivor Kenna
London
Slate system
One hopes that at the next Socialist Alliance AGM the slate system of voting will be abolished.
Apparently the slates were adopted as a temporary means whereby conference would elect the national executive committee. But the NEC is too important to be left to the attention of only the conference. It should be the responsibility of every SA member. Attendance at conference represents approximately one quarter of the actual membership. It is profoundly politically unethical that a majority of comrades are excluded from the decision-making process.
There is a viable alternative to slates: postal voting, used for the elections of their general secretaries by the PCSU, RMT and Amicus. The cost of postal voting for the NEC could be reduced by biennial elections. Officers may be elected either by single transferable vote or by a simple majority.
The sooner the slates are abolished, the more people will want to join the Socialist Alliance, the sooner the Socialist Alliance can be relaunched as a party.
Philip Maguire
Wolverhampton
Death fast
After 672 days of resistance struggle we have lost our 94th martyr: Birsen Hosver.
Nobody can escape from the reality of our country. For that means hunger, unemployment, price rises and oppression. In a land where 18% of the population is condemned to live below the level of absolute poverty, where coffins are carried from the prisons one after the other, in a land where massacres are treated as if they were fate or a ‘natural disaster’, the way to change this reality is not the ballot box, but through revolutionary struggle. Things can only be changed by resisting and organising.
Our comrade Birsen Hosver was born in 1970 in Istanbul. Her family came from Pazar, in Rize Province (on Turkey’s eastern Black Sea coast). She was a Laz, and Laz was her native language. She studied in Ankara University and had already taken part in the struggles and organisations of young people. She was detained and spent months in jail. After she was released she devoted herself completely to the struggle.
After she decided to become a people’s liberation fighter, she was arrested on February 5 1999, 18 months after joining the guerrillas. Everything else is explained in the letter she wrote when she volunteered for the death fast:
“Around December 19 the days passed differently for me. I saw myself and the situation more clearly. We are part of a mighty and glorious resistance. Nobody would have believed it, but we are achieving it. All that gives me great strength. At this time there is no alternative to resistance. We are dying, one after the other. I am very sad for them. They sacrifice themselves and there are very many of them. When the very young as well as old men and women can be so selfless and die, there is not much more to discuss. I should take part in this resistance.”
And like hundreds of comrades, when her turn came, she lay down to die on September 26 2001 as a resistance fighter in the 7th death fast team. While she was in Malatya prison she was seized and put in with ordinary (non-political) prisoners in an effort to break her resistance, and finally she was placed in total isolation. But they could not break her.
On August 22, in Ankara Numune hospital, she became immortal as one of the heroines of the great resistance.
DHKC
London
Net socialism
Having read ‘Extreme democracy and the limits of capital’ on your website, it seems to me that all the problems could be solved with the simple remedy of allowing people to vote for their own laws (Weekly Worker April 4).
My simple solution is that, as we now have the internet and mobile phones, we should now be able to vote for individual laws ourselves. It’s just about impossible to corrupt millions of voters.
An additional benefit of the internet that I’ve seen is that it creates competition which drives down prices. For example, I used to pay £17 per month for my contact lenses, but now pay £5 per month by getting them off the net. £5 appears to be as low as it can go and still allows the supplier to make a living wage. In this way, the supplier enjoys the fruits of their labour, and I as a consumer am not being exploited.
In effect true socialism, without the need for an inefficient bureaucracy, and likely acceptable to people of all political persuasions.
James Dey
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