Weekly Worker 450 Thursday October 3 2002

Letters

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Mike Pearn’s letter on the recent German elections elevates critical electoral support to mass social democratic parties - which is a tactic for Marxists in seeking to set the base of mass social democratic parties against the top - into a principle (Weekly Worker September 26).

Comrade Pearn states that “electoral support is not given to a mass party … due to its stand on this or that issue. Rather, revolutionaries call on their supporters to vote for reformist parties despite their politics. That the reformists take a more or less progressive stand on any particular issue will only determine how critical we should be and not the principle.”

This newly discovered “principle”, independent of time and space, is illustrative of the mechanical, passive attitude of many leftists towards the existing workers’ movement, not of any political insight. In a period when significant layers of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries have been so attacked by social democratic parties in power that in despair they increasingly abstain from politics, in some cases even turn to reactionary rightwing populist demagogues, some like comrade Pearn support the reformist bureaucratic apparatus and its layer of political careerists that (in Britain at least) aspire to become the bourgeoisie’s chosen representatives, no matter how far to the right their politics drift.

It is worth asking what is the purpose of critical support in elections? It was developed by the Communist International in its early, revolutionary period. The whole point of it was as an active tactic to drive a wedge between the working class base of the mass reformist party and the misleaders and bureaucrats at the top. It involves exploiting a contradiction between the aspirations of the base, and the real, anti-working class actions of the reformist leadership when placed in office. In order for this tactic to be in any way effective, there has to be a contradiction between the promises made by the reformist leaders and what the pro-capitalist leadership will be forced to do when placed in power.

If there is no real contradiction to exploit on any important question, there is no point to the tactic of critical support. If a social democratic party runs in elections agreeing with their bourgeois opponents on every real question of importance to the masses, differing only in petty details, then there is nothing with which to set the base of the party against the top. Electoral support to a social democratic party in such circumstances is in no way a revolutionary tactic.

In practice, for the left to refuse to even try to construct an alternative, while arguing for an unconditional vote to a party that, on every question, openly and brazenly trumpets its fundamental agreement with its rightist bourgeois opponents, would mean that the left will simply be identified as a hypocritical agency of the Blairites. Far from being smart tactics, keeping the powder dry until a ‘credible’ alternative to the Labour Party emerges ready-made, this is a capitulatory perspective that will simply ensure that no alternative will ever be built. While we need to develop tactics to politicise and develop those currently or formerly in the Labour Party who have progressive aspirations that are fundamentally at odds with the Blairites, telling such people to swallow their anger and keep dutifully supporting a leadership that openly declares its hatred for everything they stand for is not a recipe for building anything. It is merely a recipe for demoralisation.

A stopped clock is, as has often been noted, right twice a day. And comrade Pearn is certainly right to advocate that socialists should have advocated a vote to the SPD in the recent German elections. But in order to make it appear as just another routine election, he has to utter bland truisms and play down the differences between the SPD’s posture in this election and other elections in recent history where mainstream social democratic parties have contended for power. When he states that “if and when the USA tries to fuck over Iraq, Schröder will happily feast on the corpses of the Iraqi people”, he manages to combine a truism about the treacherous nature of social democracy with a blithe dismissal of the impact of such a betrayal on those who were won to vote for Schröder out of agreement with his pledge that his government would oppose war against Iraq, whether or not it has UN endorsement.

This promise produced a hysterical response both from the Bush administration, and from the CSU candidate, Stoiber, who accused the SPD leader of wrecking European unity with his outrageous statements. For comrade Pearn, of course, this is of a piece with voting for Tony Blair when he proudly stands for re-election on his record of having sent British troops into at least five armed conflicts since he came to power in 1997, and promising more of the same in the future.

In the real world, as opposed to the schemas of devotees of the jesuitical religion of auto-Labourite Trotskyism, there is a significant difference between the expectations of those attracted to two such very different social democratic election campaigns. A difference in consciousness that socialists and communists must take due note of with different tactics.

Ian Donovan
London

Military support

The Iraqi people and those of us who side with them against US and British imperialism will be duly heartened by Liz Hoskings’s call for “military support” (Weekly Worker September 26). Can we expect to see ‘La Pasionara’ Hoskings despatching a division of volunteers from the British left to the front, or should we prepare for a second front nearer home? At least the pacifists who are pledging themselves to ‘non-violent direct action’ intend participating in the action, rather than just offering generous and unsolicited advice to the masses in Iraq.

It’s a long time since working class militants in Britain took on the forces of the capitalist state and won. Maybe when we’ve rebuilt our own working class movement, rid it of class traitors and enemies and experienced a few victories, we might have something real to offer. We must also pay attention to the experience of working people, oppressed nationalities and communists in Iraq, for whom the issue has long been not whether to train hypothetical guns on the army, but how readily the regime turns its weapons on them. (Incidentally, if Saddam Hussein cared about the Palestinians, how come he marched his army first into Iran, and then Kuwait? Or did the commanders have their maps upside down?)

Under sanctions and bombing the working people and poor have suffered most, while the rich and the top officers in Saddam’s regime enriched themselves. Iraq’s formerly proud health service now only treats those with money. Of course the chief blame lies with the imperialist powers who have waged war on the Iraqi masses under the pretence of fighting Saddam Hussein. Our nice, civilised rulers provided Saddam Hussein with the wherewithal to gas Kurds at Halabja, and they have caused the cruel death of thousands of Iraqi children by denying them food, clean water and medicines.

But when the essentials of life are in short supply, the right of ordinary people to organise and take control of resources, to ensure fair provision and distribution, is not some remote utopian demand. It is necessary now. Similarly, the right of conscript soldiers to discuss politics and keep an eye on their officers is not a luxury, to wait till after the war, it is the way to see that the people are not betrayed. And if, as happened in Iraqi Kurdistan in the previous war, working people form shuras (revolutionary committees akin to soviets); and if meanwhile the regime has dared to arm the masses, should not these shuras, with communist participation, attempt to lead the masses and hold on to the weapons? In other words, to defend both their country and their rights? And would that not lead to the decision to wrest power from Saddam Hussein’s bourgeois clique?

This would certainly not be what Bush and Tony Blair have in mind by ‘regime change’! After the last Gulf War they chose to leave Saddam Hussein in power - now they just want a change of officer to one who will keep order for them, and do as he’s told. Balfour Beatty are probably drawing up competitive tenders for rebuilding palaces after the bombers have done their bit.

But rather than trust Saddam and his officers, the Iraqi working class is entitled to prepare its own, complete ‘regime change’, and to decide the order in which it takes on its enemies according to circumstance. As for us, in the imperialist west, recognising that the main enemy is at home doesn’t have to mean pretending our enemy’s enemy is our friend.

Charlie Pottins
email

Against Saddam

I would like to make three points in connection with Liz Hoskings’s dispute with the CPGB majority over ‘military support’ for Iraq.

Firstly, Liz accepts an untenable piece of ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist/Leninist scholasticism when she insists that ‘revolutionary defeatism’ is the policy applicable to inter-imperialist wars. As both Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in opposition to Lenin during World War I, being for the defeat of one’s own government logically implies support for the victory of an (equally imperialist) enemy state. Thus ‘defeatism’ makes a fundamental concession to the political methodology of social chauvinism - if, for instance, Lenin supported a German victory, why shouldn’t Ebert, Noske and the right wing of German Social Democracy? The independent working class position in inter-imperialist conflicts is thus refusing military support to both or all sides, while seeking to end the war through militant labour movement action up to and including socialist revolution.

As Hal Draper notes in War and revolution - Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism, Lenin was forced to redefine ‘defeatism’ to the point of meaninglessness in order to conceal the glaring lack of logic in his original position. Indeed, the defeatism slogan had almost disappeared by the end of World War I, and was only revived as part of the early Stalinist campaign against the revolutionary socialist politics represented by Trotskyism - though typically Trotsky accepted the political substance of the Stalinists’ slander by insisting that he, too, had been a defeatist!

Secondly, Mark Fischer’s front-page discussion of the issues involved in a probable US attack on Iraq is a devastating and entirely apposite indictment of the politically sterile ‘anti-imperialism’ of which Liz Hoskings’s argument is an example (Weekly Worker September 26). However, I believe that Mark confuses the issues when he states that “in the absence of democracy talk of Iraqi self-determination is meaningless”. If the US actually were trying to subjugate and conquer Iraq, I believe socialists would be right to support Iraqi self-determination even under Saddam Hussein.

National self-determination even under a profoundly undemocratic leadership is a democratic demand, because it ‘clears the decks’ for further democratic and working class struggles. Or, to put it another way, self-determination is a key component of the ‘consistent democracy’ (Lenin) essential to building a workers’ movement capable of taking power. This is why (as Liz points out), Trotsky said that he would support fascistic Brazil in a war with bourgeois democratic Britain - and why, to take a modern example, we reject the argument that Israel’s parliamentary democracy legitimises its denial of the Palestinians’ national rights. If we support Palestinian self-determination regardless of the character of the Palestinian leadership, why not Iraqi self-determination too?

Of course the point is that the US is not trying to conquer Iraq, which is why (as Mark puts it) “the call for ‘military’ defence of Iraq amounts to the same thing as politically supporting Saddam Hussein”. In the very unlikely event that the war for ‘regime change’ as part of an attempt to patch up the fabric of the capitalist world order was transformed into a war of conquest (a long-term military occupation to gain direct control of Iraqi oil) the implications of ‘military defence’ would change. Though even then I wouldn’t advocate the Workers Power line of shouting ‘Victory to Iraq’, which rightly or wrongly strikes me as implying political support for Saddam’s regime).

Liz is right, then, to advocate the military defence of nations involved in a war to secure their right to self-determination against a colonial oppressor. What she obviously fails to show is that a US attack on Iraq would fit this pattern. Unable to prove that Iraq’s national existence is under threat, she is forced to resort to the ridiculous claim that Iraq is a “semi-colony” - as if Saddam Hussein’s regime was anything other than a powerful, independent capitalist state with regional imperialist ambitions of its own.

As someone relatively new to revolutionary socialism, I find it bizarre when apparently rational people insist that the world is essentially the same as when Lenin wrote about imperialism in 1916. Is it really so hard to see that, since the victory of the colonial liberation movements in the 1940s-70s, old-style imperialist/colonialist wars have largely been replaced by wars to mend and reinforce the network of national and international institutions which underpins the dominant ‘imperialism of free trade’?

Wars of colonial subjugation/liberation have not disappeared, but are now more likely to involve the aspirations of regional ‘sub-imperialisms’ such as Serbia in Bosnia and Kosovo, Indonesia in East Timor or indeed Iraq in Kuwait. In wars where there is no issue of national self-determination at stake, to advocate military defence of a state in conflict with advanced capitalist imperialism (as Liz does) can only mean giving support to its political regime. One need not accept Liz’s risible view of the US as an old-style colonial power to reject the right of the US or other big capitalist states to act as the gendarme of world order wherever and whenever they choose.

We do indeed reserve the right of ‘regime change’ for the working class and oppressed peoples of Iraq. But to advocate military defence of Iraq when its self-determination is not under threat is to betray the Iraqi people by giving political credit to Saddam Hussein.

Sacha Ismail
AWL

Pointless

Liz Hoskings’s support for Saddam wouldn’t work. It just doesn’t happen like that really, does it? I don’t support the war, but supporting Saddam is pointless. You know it is. You sound strangely like you are attempting to be unique for some reason with a ‘new view’.

This is similar to what the US do, and it doesn’t work. A more realistic option would be for all the trade unions to threaten strikes.

Roger Conway
email

Capitulation

In reply to Jack Conrad’s response to my original letter - I’m no expert on Arabic names but I have done some research (September 26).

Saddam Hussein’s full, formal name is Saddam bin Hussein al Takriti (Saddam, son of Hussein of Takriti). According to usual practices adults are seldom called by their given names. Socially it is considered a slight to use the first name of an elder or parent.

Referring to Saddam Hussein as Saddam is just such a slight. You could rightfully argue that Saddam Hussein deserves to be so slighted, but would then need to apply this equally to all presidents, more equally to imperialist presidents. References to “Saddam” have always been associated in my mind with US propaganda. It is a diminutive used to demonise and belittle the Iraqi president.

To continue using this diminutive is indeed a capitulation to US and British war propaganda, in my opinion.

Jairaj Chetty
email

No platform

In Leeds on September 20, our comrade, Sean Matgamna, was ‘no-platformed’ - excluded on grounds of his political views (on Israel) - from a debate in which he had previously been invited to participate.

Naturally we oppose, and protest against, ourselves being excluded from political debate. We also support open debate, and oppose political bans and proscriptions, within the labour movement in general. We hope you do too. However, the exclusion on September 20 was decided on and carried through by CPGB/Weekly Worker members.

The original move for the exclusion came from Mike Marqusee, who said he would refuse to share a platform with Sean Matgamna because he was “fed up of being called an anti-semite”. This was not an intemperate overreaction to some personal conflict - Mike Marqusee and Sean Matgamna have never had a face-to-face argument on Israel - but a move for political exclusion.

However, ultimately Mike Marqusee is not the person responsible for the exclusion. He has a right to choose where he will and where he won’t speak. If he doesn’t want to speak, and doesn’t mind serious activists considering him to be petulant and unreliable, it is his right to refuse. The movement scarcely loses so much by that refusal as to override his right to choose.

What transformed Mike Marqusee’s exercise of his rights into a ‘no-platforming’ was the decision by the meeting’s organiser, Ray Gaston, to respond to Marqusee by excluding Sean Matgamna. Ray Gaston is a member of the CPGB/Weekly Worker. The office and the central leadership of the CPGB were involved and informed. They arranged a member of the CPGB central leadership, Jack Conrad, to speak in place of Sean Matgamna. They advertised the meeting in the September 19 Weekly Worker with Jack Conrad as the speaker “replacing Sean Matgamna”.

The exclusion was thus, essentially, an exclusion carried out by the CPGB, and, politically, the responsibility of the CPGB alone. This is out of order on general principle. It is especially out of order as behaviour from an organisation engaged in serious discussions and collaboration with the AWL.

Please explain.

Martin Thomas
AWL

Faith undermined

On reading a report in Solidarity of a debate on Marxism and religion in Leeds, I was shocked to discover that Sean Matgamna (editor of Workers’ Liberty), a speaker advertised in the Weekly Worker, was excluded from the debate following an ultimatum issued by Mike Marqusee (Socialist Alliance ‘independent’).

This conduct undertaken by your members seriously undermines my faith in the possibility of joint work between our organisations, in which I previously held great hope. I have always considered the CPGB to be a democratic organisation committed to serious political debate. Surely there must be an explanation?

Ruth Cashman
AWL

Orwell’s PC

Many PC users may not realise it, but Microsoft Windows is bringing your computer into the Big Brother world of George Orwell’s novel.

When you use the latest version of this, you give permission to Microsoft to disable any other software they don’t like. In particular, these programs may disable programs which convert a CD track to an MP3, even though it’s both legal and very convenient to play some music while you work. To be exact, you agree: “These security-related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer.”

It is like having your own personal policeman sitting in your computer, except the policeman enforces Microsoft’s laws, rather than your government’s. Microsoft should publicise their new policy: ‘What will we prevent you from doing today?’ We finally know Big Brother’s name. It is Bill Gates.

Tom Trottier
email

Labour lefts

Looking for Labour lefts in my part of the world is a pointless exercise (Marcus Ström Weekly Worker September 26). You lot were inside the moribund Communist Party during the 80s when there was a Labour left. You now seek to tilt at windmills by calling on some sort of approach to the fictitious Labour left.

The CPGB is a London-centric rump and no longer exists outside the capital. You, the SWP and Socialist Appeal all tail New Labour.

John Malcolm
Teesside

State-sponsored CPGB

Since coming into contact with the CPGB for the first time about two years ago, I have at times seriously harboured suspicions that you are a state-sponsored organisation whose aim it is to disrupt the possible growth and coming together of socialist organisations and individuals.

The reasons for this lie both in some of your policies, which concur with the establishment’s view, and your methods of intervening.

Some brief examples of this are:

• Environmental issues: you appear to dismiss global warming, changing weather patterns. Coupled with this, your apparent view of more unregulated industrialisation as a way forward for the developing world suggests you share the establishment’s view on this, particularly the American right.
• Afghanistan: Despite detailed examples in books such as Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban about the west’s motives for their new great game in the area and the involvement in recent years of oil companies, including one that employed one Hamed Karzai, and the issue of oil pipelines, you continue to deny that there are economic issues involved in the west’s thinking. Surely someone in the CPGB has read this book, so why the continued denial of these facts?
• The national question: under the guise of attempting to appear clever you basically do not accept that class is the fundamental divide in society. This leads you to conclude that jews and Arabs cannot live peacefully together, again echoing the establishment’s view. You are at least consistent in your approach to this question, as you also conclude that catholics and protestants in Ireland cannot live together - hence your extremely bizarre position on Ireland.

In addition to this, your attempts to impose demands such as for the abolition of all immigration controls on organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition are either a deliberate attempt to reduce the possible size and inhibit the growth of the coalition or, to be charitable, is a complete misunderstanding of what it entails to build such coalitions.

Coupled with this, your method at any sort of meeting of first and foremost raising disagreements immediately in what usually appears to be an attempt at petty point-scoring leads to many people being repelled by the approach.

I hope my suspicions are because of the above and not because of some malign MI5 influence!

Ian Thomas
South Wales

Kiwi Labour

Paul Harris’s letter is quite extraordinary (Weekly Worker September 26). The New Zealand Labour Party is not only Blairite: it invented ‘Blairism’.

Paul tries to present Labour as some kind of workers’ party, but this has long since ceased to be the case. There are only three unions in the entire country which remain affiliated to Labour and they organise something like a mere three percent of the workforce and 15% of the organised workforce. Even this tiny wee band of union affiliates have no power in the Labour Party.

Labour received the endorsement in July of most of the capitalist class and a great deal more business money than the National Party. Indeed, Labour’s sources of funding are another indication of how it has no organic connection with any sizeable section of workers. The vast bulk of Labour funding - at least 90%, I’d say - comes from business and the capitalist state. National this time around was left whinging about being ‘cash-strapped’ because most business money was going to Labour.

Paul paints a rather strange picture of what Labour in power has done since 1999 as well. We should perhaps recall that in the 1980s Labour here carried out a neoliberal economic slash-and-burn policy that would have made Margaret Thatcher blush. Labour was the darling of the bourgeoisie. National actually stood to the left of Labour economically throughout that entire decade.

During her brief stint as minister of health in the 1980s Labour government, current Labour leader and prime minister Helen Clark closed more hospitals than all the ministers of health in New Zealand history put together, introduced prescription charges and drove through as much privatisation as she possibly could. Hardly the traditional social democratic programme.

The current Labour government, in its entirety, voted ‘full support’ for Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and despatched SAS troops to Afghanistan. The Labour government continues to participate fully in the barbaric sanctions on Iraq. Its Employment Relations Act bans political strikes and makes it harder to strike in general.

Labour’s election ads this year never once mentioned class or the poor. Instead they featured presidential shots of Clark with sound bites from people like Colin Powell describing the relationship of Washington and her as “very, very, very good friends”. After returning from a US trip Clark told New Zealanders what an intelligent man George Bush was.

Labour has also been very successful in holding down wages and generally increasing the inequality gap for the capitalists whose interests they serve. Under Labour, real wages have risen a meagre 0.1% - under National they rose at 60 times that rate! On the other hand, the wealthiest people in the country, those on the New Zealand Rich List, saw their wealth rise 17% in just the last year.

One of the best indications of what a miserly capitalist party and government Labour is can be seen by the plight of the poor. In 1991 the National government cut unemployment, solo parents’ and widows’ benefits by around 25%. When it got back into office, Labour announced that no way would it even return these benefits to 1991 levels. Clark also turned down a proposal from the Greens in 1999 that beneficiaries get an extra week’s benefit for Christmas.

The total detachment of Labour from workers and the poor is not hard to fathom when we look at the social composition of the Labour Party. Numerically, Labour is now tiny, with only a few thousand members and most of these are middle class. You’d be hard pressed to find even a few dozen manual workers active in the party these days. Even lower-rung white-collar workers are few and far between. Labour conferences are social events of the liberal middle class. If you look at Labour’s party list in the elections, of the top 10 you find half or more are well-heeled academics. The rest are business managers and a farmer. The 10th person on the list is a trade union bureaucrat.

Labour’s transition from a social democratic party into a liberal-bourgeois party also explains why large sections of workers and poor no longer vote for it. Paul is living in a fantasy world on this one and it’s therefore not surprising that he leaves out some rather important statistics. The July election here saw the highest abstention level in NZ recorded electoral history. A bit less than 75% of voters went to the polls - down from about 84% last time, in a country with historically among the highest voter-participation levels in the world. Moreover, in the Maori seats, which are among the poorest in the country, if not the actual poorest, almost half the voters stayed away.

Contrast this to the support Labour got in Tory seats. National only won 22 constituency seats out of 60 - but in 16 of these 22 seats, the party vote went to Labour. Labour has basically shed a massive chunk of working class and poor voters - who now largely abstain - and replaced them with Tory middle and upper class voters who rightly see in Labour MPs people just like themselves.

We urgently need a new political movement to challenge the capitalist Labour Party. The group around Revolution magazine (www.revolution.org.nz), I guess, could broadly be labelled as ‘pro-Trotsky’ - although we certainly do not describe ourselves as Trotskyists. The Workers Party, which is pro-Mao - but doesn’t identify itself as either Maoist or Stalinist - and ourselves have launched the Anti-Capitalist Alliance to begin this process.

We have found a great deal of political agreement on contemporary issues, which has allowed us to substantially expand our collaboration. Small as our election campaign was, it amounted to the biggest far-left campaign in decades and the ACA is becoming a small pole of attraction for people who want to fight back against the yuppie Labour government and its big business backers.

Philip Ferguson
New Zealand

Tribunal success

Comrades may like to know that I have now received the findings of my employment tribunal. Over a year after I was downgraded from driver to ticket collector the employment tribunal has now found in my favour. Their findings quite clearly exonerate me and are a damning indictment of South West Trains management.

The unanimous decision of the tribunal is that “the complaint of unfair dismissal is well-founded”. Commenting on the original cause of my discipline, they “see no pattern of recklessness or general disregard for the rules and think that the case is best categorised as one of minor inadvertence”. They go on to assert: “We are entirely satisfied that (notwithstanding the exceptional wording of the speeding charges) the applicant’s errors did not cause the train or its passengers any danger.”

Instead they are forthright in declaring that it was my trade unionism that led to my downgrading: “In circumstances where no other coherent explanation suggests itself, the excessive form of punishment, the absence of any credible explanation for it and the numerous unsatisfactory features of the respondents’ case combine to point very clearly, in our view, to the applicant’s past trade union activities and the prospect of his engaging in such activities in the future as being the true cause.”

They turn the spotlight on South West Trains management. Of the manager who took the original disciplinary hearing they comment: “The mental processes which Mr Cook claimed to have followed disclose as clear a case of unfair dismissal as one could imagine. We found him a deeply unimpressive witness who appeared to give his evidence without regard for truth and solely with an eye to where the advantage lay. We found much of his evidence implausible, and even absurd.”

The senior manager who subsequently took the appeal fares no better: “Mr Marsden struck us, like Mr Cook, as a witness with no regard for truth, willing to say whatever he thought might improve his own position. Like that of Mr Cook, and in striking contrast with the frank and straightforward testimony of the applicant, we found much of Mr Marsden’s evidence incredible, and some of it risible.”

Summing up the evidence, the tribunal concludes: “Those factors also suggest to us that the dismissal was part of a concerted manoeuvre involving several influential members of the respondents’ management.”

South West Trains now has 28 days to come up with an agreeable form of restitution. We will continue to press for my full reinstatement as a driver. Thanks to all those who have supported me in the campaign against SWT victimisation.

Greg Tucker
London

Corrections

I was flattered that you published my talk on oil (Weekly Worker September 19).

Perhaps, however, it might have been wiser to have had it proof-read by me to avoid some howlers which readers will blame on my ignorance. These include the statements that Iraqi oil deposits exceed those of Saudi Arabia, for example. Further, in talking of the colonisation of the state in the US, I was careful to use the Marxist term ‘privatised state’ to draw attention to the almost exclusive grabbing of the state apparatus by one particular faction of capital, thus partially usurping the function of the state as the ‘executive committee’ of capital in general to that of ‘capital in particular’.

But I am still grateful and flattered to be in print in the best journal of the left in Britain.

Mehdi Kia
email

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