Weekly Worker 447 Thursday September 12 2002
Letters
No gossip sheet
I do agree with Marcus Ström’s main arguments for a Socialist Alliance paper (Weekly Worker September 5). Of course socialists should be involved in working class struggles, as stated by “Unreconstructed Trot” (whatever that is!) in the Letters page, but unless we learn from the experience of these struggles by discussing them openly in a workers’ paper, the lessons for future struggles will be lost.
Take Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike - a magnificent workers’ struggle if ever there was one. Yet when trying to build a new socialist party as an alternative to New Labour Arthur turns up at the Socialist Labour Party annual congress with 3,000 votes in his back pocket to bureaucratically vote through all the policies he wants. What has he and what have the working class learned from the miners’ strike? What would Trotsky or even Lenin say about it? I think we can guess about Stalin. We need to discuss these issues openly, even to go back to the miners’ strike and examine how it was conducted in order to get things right the next time. This means a serious working class paper.
Marcus goes astray in some of his arguments about the SA in my opinion and these detract from his case for an SA paper rather than strengthen it. For example he says the SA was an accident of history, scratched out of Dave Nellist’s head. In fact the first SA in Coventry grew out of a political fight in the local Labour Party over the 1992 general election. This was the culmination of the left-right battles throughout the 1980s.
There were two Independent Labour candidates who stood in the general election - Dave Nellist, who had been expelled from the Labour Party as a member of Militant, and John Hughes, a member of the Campaign Group of MPs who had been ballot-rigged (according to the local paper and police) from his position. There were two election campaigns which were quite separate. There was a witch-hunt against members of both these campaigns led by a local rightwing councillor, Neil Rider, who had only recently joined the Labour Party after 15 years in the Communist Party of Britain - it seems he hated Trots even above capitalists. He took it upon himself to video comrades on stalls and photograph posters in comrades’ windows. As a result of his evidence 130 members of the Labour Party were expelled - the active members of the left.
The Coventry Socialist Alliance came about from the combination of the two election campaigns and from the 130 comrades who had been expelled. Most of these were independents and not members of Militant. This is true of left activists in the Labour Party throughout the struggles of the 1980s: the vast majority were independents and not members of any group. This is a point to bear in mind when describing independents in the SA who are in a minority and about whom Marcus is very scathing.
I have discussed with some of the 130 expelled comrades who now won’t have anything to do with the SA. After the Socialist Party departed on December 1 2001 I was told: ‘What did you expect? You’re dealing with the Militant. They operated the same way in the broad left of the Labour Party in the 1980s - either they dominate an organisation or they break it up. They do not know how to work with other people or other organisations. The SWP - they are just the same - look at the Anti-Nazi League.’
In other words the experience that these comrades have of left groups is one of sectarian and bureaucratic behaviour. I would say that there are far more independent socialists who have similar experiences than there are members of left groups. They might join a party like the Scottish Socialist Party, but are very wary of the SA for good reasons. To call them soft reformists - as against the granite-hard revolutionaries of the left groups - seems to me to miss the point. An SA paper could help to clear the air and break down the sectarian and bureaucratic barriers.
In fact what is amazing is that there are any independents in the SA at all. It is rather like Oscar Wilde’s description of a second marriage - the triumph of hope over experience.
The SP involvement with the Socialist Alliance started in 1996, when Arthur Scargill began to build the SLP in preparation for the 1997 general election. This same point was made by Harry Paterson in an article some time ago in the Weekly Worker. When it became clear that Arthur was not going to allow the SP into the SLP, the SP tried to stop independent lefts joining the SLP by setting up socialist forums in the areas where they had some influence. I can remember Dave Nellist coming to a Coventry Socialist Alliance meeting and proposing that the SP, the SA and some Socialist Movement comrades form a Coventry Socialist Forum. I asked him why we needed a forum when we already had an alliance. At that point the Coventry SA was run by independents. All the SP and SM comrades had to do was to join the alliance: we were not a party. The SP did join the alliance and started setting up alliances and forums elsewhere.
Marcus says the SP played the SA “pretty much with a dead bat”. That is exactly what they did and explains the amateurism and other features that Marcus notes about the SA of that time. It was a deliberate policy on the part of the SP. They could have taken the route of the SSP in Scotland, but they chose quite consciously not to. The change in the SA came, as Marcus rightly points out, from the London SA’s fight to organise around the Greater London Assembly elections and then the general election after that. This was not an initiative from the SP or from the national Liaison Committee of the SA, as far as I am aware, because the SP would not have wanted such an initiative.
The fact is nobody would have known all this unless details of internal decisions and reports from the branches had not been published regularly in the Weekly Worker. When I told comrades in Coventry SA that I had read Scottish Militant had split from Taaffe and were setting up the SSP and later that the Merseyside branch had left the SP, nobody would believe me, because the SP always behaved as though Dave Nellist, Tommy Sheridan and Cathy Gibson were all singing from the same hymn sheet when clearly they were not.
Is the Weekly Worker a gossip sheet and sectarian stirrer? I think not. Political activists need to know what is going on and have a frank and honest assessment. Smarm and bullshit can only be short-term methods. Differences need to be smoked out and acknowledged.
Dave Spencer
Coventry
Resistance futile
The International Socialist Group/Socialist Solidarity Network initiative for a new paper around their meagre forces is an “open and inclusive” project for “creative Marxism” in the mind’s eye of our friends Alan Thornett and Phil Hearse.
The editorial board is open to anyone who supports the initial statement from the ISG/SSN (oh, except for those in the CPGB). Even the name of the paper, Resistance, “is a working title for the new paper - a final decision on the name has yet to be taken”.
How generous of them. However, is it just me, or do other people think it a bit previous of them that on the support slip for the new paper in this month’s Socialist Outlook it asks that cheques be made out to … Resistance?
No final decision made? How inclusive.
Doug Green
London
Avoiding a fight
My article ‘Foot for mayor’ in last week’s paper wrongly stated that Liz Davies had proposed changing Hackney SA “rosettes, leaflets, etc” to red, green and purple. In fact her proposal was just to change the colour of the rosettes.
However, as this is clearly a political proposal - to make us look more green and feminist - the logic is to change all our material to reflect this. It is good that the SWP voted against the proposal, but a shame that the only way they felt able to do this was by proposing a badge instead. They went to such pains to avoid a public argument with Liz Davies on the question that they missed the opportunity to make clear that for them the working class - whose traditional colour of struggle is red - is the agency for the effective fight for human liberation on all fronts.
Anne Mc Shane
Hackney
Non-political ANL
It’s not the ANL’s job to be political; it is an organisation for the explicit purpose of anti-racist activism (‘Good music, weak politics’ Weekly Worker September 5).
So the ‘Love music, hate racism’ carnival was very successful because it did what it set out to do - which was to show popular opposition to the BNP and other racists. If the politics were weak, it was only the responsibility of those groups which didn’t show up, not the ANL’s.
I do agree, though, that the Socialist Alliance needs a paper.
Laurie McCauley
email
Incoherent ANL
The organisers of the carnival claim 30,000 attended. I was there and there were nowhere near that number.
Another sad aspect of the occasion was the incoherent rants from ANL organisers between the acts. One was in a fit of rage about the cover of The Observer magazine. “Do you know who’s on the front of The Observer today?” she began. At the end of her speech she ripped up the magazine without ever getting round to saying who was actually on the cover. Another one urged us to go to Burnley and “close down the BNP bookshop”. There is no BNP bookshop in Burnley.
This sort of thing gets the anti-fascist cause nowhere.
Steve Turner
email
Israel-Palestine
I am happy that Rabbi Sacks has made public his views about Israel (Weekly Worker September 5). Personally, I would have been much more critical, as I’m sure all of you would, of the Israeli government.
He also made some interesting comments about pluralism in a recent Guardian article, saying that he hears “echoes of the voice of god when listening to muslims, christians and others” - a theme he draws upon in his book, the one you are selling on your website. It is good that the man who is seen by many to be the representative of all British jews has this stance.
But to me, as a British jew in the progressive, liberal movement of Judaism, I can treat his comments with nothing but cynicism and contempt. Rabbi Sacks refuses to recognise me as jewish because I am part of the progressive movement. He sees only orthodoxy as true Judaism, orthodoxy that has some sexist and homophobic elements. To Sacks, who has made it clear that Judaism is about compassion and not oppressing other people, the fundamentalist, murderous maniac, Baruch Goldstein, is jewish, but I am not. How can he, in good conscience, embrace other religions when he refuses to fully embrace his own?
I think we should be careful about the amount of praise we shower on this man. Comrade Bernal does indeed praise Sacks, saying that he may be “giving courage to jews across the world”. Maybe so. But only jews that pass his entry test.
Daniel Randall
email
Case-sensitive
Why do you persist in the strange habit of printing the word ‘Jew’ in lower case? The only other instances I’ve come across of this usage of ‘jew’ in lower case is in the ravings of anti-semites. That you do the same with ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’, and for that matter ‘God’, doesn’t make the practice any better. It comes across as merely a gratuitous insult to people to whom these words matter deeply.
Either justify it, or junk it.
Ken MacLeod
email
Kiwi left
This is to inform you of some recent political developments in New Zealand. At the end of July, elections here saw Labour returned as the largest party in parliament. Previously it held 49 seats in the 120-member parliament and was in a coalition with the social democratic Alliance party (10 seats), supported from outside government by the Greens (seven seats).
Earlier this year the Alliance imploded. This was partly due to differences over the war in Afghanistan, but more generally over the party MPs’ tailing of Labour. The Alliance was losing its branding in the process and running within the margin of error in opinion polls. At the same time, Labour was riding very high in the polls, at 55%, and its leader, prime minister Helen Clark, saw a chance to go for a Labour majority and called an early election. Once campaigning began, Labour support fell off, and they ended up with 52 seats.
The former leader of the Alliance and outgoing deputy prime minister, Jim Anderton, had formed a new outfit, the Progressive Coalition, consisting essentially of the right wing of the Alliance. They won two seats and went into coalition. This minority government then did a deal with the United Future NZ party, led by rightwing 1980s Labour MP Peter Dunne. His party, which has barely registered in voters’ minds since it was set up just before the 1996 elections, substantially increased its support on the back of Dunne’s appearance in a leaders’ debate on TV, and ended up with eight MPs.
The Greens lost their one constituency seat, but due to the party vote increased their representation to nine seats. The ACT party, self-styled champions of the ‘free’ market, maintained its vote and took nine seats, all thanks to the party vote.
NZ First, a party that is based on two interesting constituencies - Maori and pensioners - and which was in coalition with National in the late 1990s, sharply increased its support. While it plummeted in 1999 and was almost electorally wiped out, as the coalition with National unravelled, it almost tripled its support this time around on a platform of opposition to the Treaty of Waitangi, industry and immigration and a call for tougher law and order policies.
Apart from the Alliance, the big loser of the election was the National Party, the traditional conservative party since 1935. It scored its worst result ever, and the worst result for the chief conservative party since 1901. National lost a dozen seats and now has a mere 27 MPs. Essentially, with Labour in NZ occupying the same kind of ground as the Blairites, the conventional Tory parties in both countries have been wrong-footed and pushed to the margins.
The electoral obliteration of the Alliance confirms the argument made by Revolution magazine since we began in 1997 - that there is no longer a material basis or political space for social democracy. The NZ Labour Party has been transformed into a liberal middle class party that manages the system and is currently backed by NZ capital. The remnants of old-style social democracy grouped in the Alliance have just been annihilated.
Supporters of Revolution joined with the Workers Party to form the Anti-Capitalist Alliance just before the elections. Although our forces are tiny, we have now signed up about 150 paper members nationally. We stood four candidates in the elections - modest as this is, it is the most significant left electoral intervention here in several decades! Our candidates scored small votes, but in the seats where we ran we averaged 20-25% of the vote scored by Alliance candidates - and that is a party which had 10 MPs, plenty of TV coverage and hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funding in recent years.
While our candidates were welcomed by groups of workers, the rest of the far left decided not to vote for us. For instance, the Socialist Workers Organisation, which is aligned with the British Socialist Workers Party, called for a vote for the Greens, whose politics their own increasingly resemble. The International Socialist Organisation, which is aligned with the American ISO, were invited to join the ACA but declined, saying they were too small to contribute much and we were being too ambitious. They called for a vote for the disintegrating Alliance. While we have left the door open to the ISO, we have never invited the SWO to be involved due to their increasingly rightward evolution and bitter hostility to revolutionary groups. They also appear to be in terminal decline.
As collaboration between the two small groups which initiated the Anti-Capitalist Alliance has expanded, the ACA has been able to take some new initiatives. We have just produced the first issue of the Industrial Worker, a regular new bulletin for factory workers. We have started Alt.teacher, a small magazine for teachers, who have recently been fighting a major battle with the government. We are looking as well at producing individual workplace bulletins. The ACA is also launching a regular anti-imperialist magazine, which will replace the Revolution group’s MidEast Solidarity magazine. On top of these we have a journal, which comes out every two to three weeks (the WP’s publication) and Revolution (a substantial quarterly magazine). In October we are holding a weekend-long national educational and organising conference in Wellington and initiating an anti-imperialist/anti-war march for the same weekend.
As the rest of the Marxist left in NZ stagnates and declines, the ACA offers the best hope for the revitalisation of revolutionary, working class politics in many years.
Philip Ferguson
New Zealand
Hawks and doves
Over the past month the newspapers have been filled with comments from both hawks and doves arguing for and against attacking Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein.
It is likely that there will be an attack, regardless of whether the weapons inspectors are allowed back in or UN approval given. This increasingly unilateral US regime is completely unconcerned with world opinion. The only issues up for debate are the means to be employed in removing Saddam Hussein and when this will take place.
The main reason the Bush administration has given is the imminent threat that Saddam poses through his attempts to manufacture or acquire nuclear weapons. To date there has been scant evidence to support these claims. The ex-head of the UN inspection team, Scott Ritter, is on record as saying that, “The manufacture of nuclear weapons emits gamma rays that would be detected. We have been watching via satellite and other means and if Iraq was producing such weapons today we would have definitive proof.”
They have not found this proof and it remains to be seen what Blair will do now. But even if it is true that Saddam has nuclear capability, is he really bent on going out in a blaze of glory by nuking America? Although he is a failed expansionist and ruthless dictator, he most certainly is not an austere jihadi warrior trying to attain martyrdom. Saddam’s clique know full well that any nuclear strike would the mean the end of Iraq, its people and, more importantly, them.
Why, then, attack Iraq? President Bush faces a number of domestic problems, all of which could be buried by a war. With his popularity starting to slip, a successful campaign would boost his chances of re-election. In addition there is the embarrassment of not being able to display a dead or captured bin Laden. Saddam will do instead. In addition American economic stability and their maintenance of power in the region are key questions. American military bases safeguard the world’s second largest oil reserves and check any Iranian ambitions in the region. Installing a new pro-western regime in Baghdad would secure this oil for the American domestic market and maintain US regional dominance, should the house of Saud fall.
In a recent Pentagon briefing the US military stated that in the process of ‘liberating’ Iraq some 10,000 civilians could become casualties. The price the Iraqi people will pay is breathtaking.
Charles Ellis Smith
email
September 11
When the peoples of the world see the faces of the families who lost their loved ones in the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, they understand their human suffering because they have long suffered terror bombings, genocide and economic exploitation by the governments representing the very companies which had head offices in that building.
Why do the US, Britain and other imperialist countries remember, with all the hype and media fanfare that the richest regimes of the world can afford, only the victims of September 11 and not the millions upon millions who have died at the hands of imperialism? Where are the monuments to and the remembrance ceremonies for those who have died owing to US and British imperialism?
Can those people like ourselves who are interested in equality for the peoples of the world really say that we can commemorate one without the other? The answer has to be ‘no’. Further, can we say that one should join in this memorial, even if the oppressed had some representation in it? Is there moral equivalence, or an equal scale of suffering between those 2,838 people who died on September 11 2001 and the millions of victims of the US and British regimes? If we are to respect the peoples of the world and historical facts, the answer must be ‘no’ again. To say otherwise would display an infection, to some degree, of slave mentality towards oppression and exploitation and to treat the lives of the peoples in the oppressed countries as less than those of the oppressor countries.
The greatest single acts of terrorism in the history of the world were conducted by the US imperialists against the Japanese people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the World War II. Monuments have yet to be erected for these victims of US terrorism. There are no national one-minute silences for the 30,000 children who die every day (a holocaust every 200 days) because of lack of clean drinking water, which is caused precisely by the system of imperialist looting. When will those who constructed the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and all the supporters of their work around the world, compensate the people of Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, Laos, Afghanistan and many other countries which have been bombed and invaded by the US and Britain?
The imperialists use resources and the most advanced human scientific knowledge, which could provide for clean drinking water for all the world’s people, instead for the development of the greatest killing machines. With this military weaponry they intimidate the people and frequently discharge these weapons all across the world, crossing every national border, on those who resist their dictates. For once in history, a group of young people from one of these oppressed countries - Saudi Arabia - decided to cross national borders and return this treatment momentarily into the two symbols and institutions of US imperialism. The storm of resentment and resistance came back to hit the US on September 11 2001.
The people in the oppressor countries must stand with the oppressed. The people in the imperialist countries need full employment, decent homes, free universal education, an end to discrimination and a pension deserving of a lifetime’s commitment to one’s country; they do not need the wealth from their work being siphoned off into the pockets of the rich for further exploitation and war. It is to this latter end that we are being asked to join the memorial to the victims of September 11.
The real democrats of the US and Britain are people like Paul Robeson, Arthur Scargill, James Connolly, Shapurji Saklatvala and Claudia Jones. These people championed (and in the case of Arthur Scargill, still champions) the interests of the British and US people for their rights and for friendship with the peoples of the world.
To say these things means being repressed under new repression laws which have been brought in to tighten up the imperialist state apparatus. In Britain’s case, the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 are the new anti-popular weapons in their armoury. These laws are attacks on all anti-imperialists and all those who stand for peace in the world. The right to freedom of speech and expression have been removed completely and freedom to organise politically has been criminalised.
We refuse to be criminalised for telling the truth and building solidarity between the oppressed people of the world. We refuse to be slaves under this decadent and parasitic system of imperialism. We urge all progressive people to unite with the just struggle to end imperialism once and for all, thereby abolishing war, poverty and misery.
Che-Leila Youth Brigades
London
War and homophobia
Recently Indymedia have posted a blatantly homophobic picture and caption on its website at www.uk.indymedia.org - it shows Blair sucking Bush’s penis with the caption, “I’ve heard he likes it up the arse too, but more on that later”.
There can be no legitimate connection between showing such images and being anti-war. The only reason can be because Indymedia somehow see a connection between the immorality of what Blair and Bush are doing and the ‘immorality’ of homosexual acts.
Please visit the site and send an email to Indymedia, telling them that we who are against war are also against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
Steve Davies
Birmingham
