Weekly Worker 457 Thursday November 21 2002
Letters
ESF not radical
It is no surprise to me that your English Social Alliance was not officially present at the Florence ESF (Weekly Worker November 14). But don’t be disheartened: this is typical of the International Socialist Tendency. They are constantly jumping on the back of any passing radical-looking mare. I just find it astonishing that your group still think you will be able to have any influence over the Socialist Workers Party within the SA.
Further, I think you are all making the ESF out to be something it is not, just because Rifondazione Comunista took part. The World Social Forum international council has manufactured the ESF, and I still cannot find the members listed anywhere online. Among the sponsors of the WSF are the Ford Foundation; Droits et Démocratie (a foundation run by the foreign ministry of Canada), the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (associated with the German Green Party), the ICCO (a religious organisation funded by the Netherlands government and the European Union) and the British Oxfam, among others. In other words the ESF is not that leftwing, let alone socialist!
How about Ciranda, the ‘independent’ media centre of the WSF? Its sponsors are Le Monde Diplomatique and IPS. IPS have some interesting sponsors, such as the foreign ministries of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden; various UN agencies; the European Commission; and Unesco!
The initiative for the World Social Forum came primarily from Attac, which began as a lobby for the Tobin tax, but became a focus of a wider economic-nationalist trend here in France. It is supported by many non-governmental organisations, but remember that the first goal of any NGO is to secure its own funding. Other goals are secondary, and sincere commitment is not typical of NGOs and their employees. If the World Social Forum acts as a lobby for global funding of NGOs, then it will have their support, even if its policies and structures are unjust.
In trying to parallel the ruling classes’ World Economic Forums meetings as its alternative, the WSF will mimic its hierarchical structure: a supranational, non-governmental body that seeks to shape the global agenda, with no accountability to, and far removed from, those whose daily lives are affected.
As the WSF’s annual meeting is seen as the premier gathering of socially concerned leaders, its statements will carry great political weight and its discussions will map out public policy. The massively bureaucratic NGOs will continue to gather in ever and ever greater numbers. They will be able to attend meetings yearly and serve as members of the organising council in between.
Genuine grassroots activists like the Socialist Alliance and local protest groups who operate on a shoestring will not be heard. These NGOs will dictate the themes and strategies discussed at the World Social Forum and their regional bodies such as the ESF, restricting from the outset the issues raised by the grassroots organisations.
Created by the will of the WSF, the ESF is not a radical organisation and cannot be reformed. The ESF will not become the European Socialist Alliance, comrades!
Henri LeBlanc
France
No Sweat
There are a number of inaccuracies in your article, ‘European SA needed’ (Weekly Worker November 14).
Firstly, the No Sweat meeting coordinated by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty was not held in the Fortezza, but at one of the other venues in Florence - about a half hour bus ride away. Mick Duncan was not at the event, so couldn’t possibly have spoken, because he was denied an entry visa to Italy. Was James Bull actually there?
Perhaps he is getting confused with the ‘No Sweat Europe’ meeting held in the Fortezza on the Thursday, which was hosted by the League for a Revolutionary Communist International and Revolution.
Sandra Griffiths
Workers Power
Different SA
Although I agree with much of Tony Humphreys’ letter regarding the SA and respect his choice to stay within the Labour Party and fight for change within, he must realise that many good comrades either found it intolerable to remain after the rightward shift or, in the case of Militant supporters, were forced out (Weekly Worker November 14).
Yes, it would be ideal if all socialists were fighting under one umbrella, but just because the mass of organised labour is still affiliated to the Labour Party, it does not automatically make that party the natural vehicle to promote or bring about socialism. The real alternative workers’ party would be able to organise within every trade union and protest organisation without exception, throughout Britain (and hopefully with the coming of a European Socialist Party, throughout the continent). Surely you do not need to be a card-carrying member of the Labour Party to do this.
At present, trade unions simply fight for immediate gains, wresting from the employers what they can force them to yield, working within the capitalist system and never looking beyond. Antonio Gramsci argued that because the function of a union is to affect the terms and conditions of the sale of labour to the employers, it is an organisation specific to a capitalist society. He said that unions develop a top-down regime once they become institutionalised in bargaining with the employers because this enables the emergent leadership to ensure that the workforce does not violate its part of the bargain with management.
Consequently the union concentrates its scope so that the power and discipline of the movement are focused in a central office. So it seems to me, whether the leader of a union is a ‘capitalist-embracing’ Ken Jackson or a ‘Stalinist’ Arthur Scargill, he becomes a labour baron clinging to a well paid job at the head of a large bureaucracy and is often as alienated from the shop floor as the employer. In their present form I can’t see how these bodies will promote socialism any better than their impotent cousins across the pond in the USA.
I’m sure many of us would love to see the Socialist Alliance become an alternative workers’ party with influence in the labour movement, but it appears that the dominance of the SWP is more of a hindrance than a help with regards to recruitment. This is a shame, as the SWP is without doubt the largest socialist group/party in England and the SA would be almost non-existent without its backing.
The restructuring of the unions and the promotion of socialist ideas within the workplace could be greatly enhanced by a new mass socialist party - but the SA is not even at the starting gate, because, as comrade Humphreys reminds us, it is nothing but an electoral front for the SWP. I think the people the SA are trying to attract will not join an organisation so dominated by a Bolshevik-style group.
So, like comrade Humphreys, I too do not think the SA will become the vehicle we are waiting for, although I do hope in the future a broader movement will develop where no one group has such an intimidating majority!
Mervyn Davies
Colchester
Pitiful result
I note that straight after the ‘triumph’ of the Hackney mayoral election it was back to the old routine for the Socialist Alliance, as a pitiful 41 votes (1.5%) were picked up in Downham ward, Lewisham. If indeed SA members from across London were involved in any campaign work, then surely this result illustrates that something, somewhere, is seriously wrong.
It seems the left cannot or will not accept that its approach and strategy simply is not striking a chord with the working class - not megaphone-wielding students or middle class radicals, but the working class. If it is to avoid political oblivion (if it has not done so already) the left must drop its tired formulas and adopt a strategy which reflects the immediate concerns of working class communities.
Maybe if this tactic had been used in Downham, a vote more akin to the 20% the BNP secured in the same poll would have been achievable.
Ivan Doyle
Oxford
Tories
I just want to comment that ‘IDS into the abyss?’ is an excellent article on the crisis in the Conservative Party (Weekly Worker November 14). I hope the author is considering continuing his analysis of the way Labour has taken and is running with the agenda of the bourgeoisie.
The Weekly Worker is also the place in which an examination of the future of the SA can be undertaken. Somehow we all need a strategy to move the SA into being the major forum for left politics in England and to save it from being the plaything of the ‘vanguardists’ who think they are still living in the 1930s.
Richard Harris
email
Turkey
In the past I have had a number of sharp political exchanges with some CPGB comrades, disagreeing as I do with a number of your policies. However, giving credit where it is due, the article on the recent Turkish general election under the by-line Aziz Demir, is one of the most informative articles that I have read on this subject in the British press (Weekly Worker November 14).
Unfortunately many on the left within Britain, along with the mainstream media, fail to see the importance of Turkey. If they do cover the country in their press, they concentrate the majority of the time on the Kurdish question.
Turkey is a large country in an important central geographic crossroads - east meets west, to put it simply - with a population of over 60 million that is increasing at the fastest rate within Europe. In the last 20-odd years its urban proletariat has increased tenfold and continues to increase, as its population migrates internally into Turkey’s larger cities.
The Turkish economy, which can best be described as being like a yo-yo, is ripe for social change. The country’s ruling elite recognises this fact, hence they have surreptitiously poured money and support into the coffers of the winner of the recent election, the AKP. They realised that whilst the newly forming proletariat would not vote for the rightwing parties of big business, like True Path and Motherland, in any numbers, they may well, with the conservative social customs that many of the class have brought to the cities from their home villages, be attracted to a seemingly moderate islamic party. This is what happened.
Demir’s article not only brought together the majority of the major players on the Turkish political scene (although the presidential office was omitted), but included useful links so that readers can continue to update themselves.
Mick Hall
email
Lenin wrong
Ian Donovan is absolutely correct to state that Alan Woods’s book on Bolshevism should be read critically (Weekly Worker November 14). Some very old dogmas, based on Ted Grant’s wooden interpretation of the Russian Revolution, are prominent in the book. For instance, the old Militant group tactic of putting pressure on reformists to take power on a socialist programme is present on the discussion on 1917 and the July days.
We can read on page 547 that Lenin “put the onus for violence and civil war on the shoulders of the reformist leaders who had it in their hands to take power peacefully”. According to comrade Woods, this strategy of Lenin’s was correct all along and right up to July. The Bolsheviks invited or made an allowance for the compromisers to take power and limited themselves to the application of pressure on reformists rather than lead the revolution themselves. In other words, if the reformists had not been treacherous there would have been no need for insurrection.
Even Alan Woods concedes that the refusal of the misleaders of the soviets to take power made insurrection - or, as he prefers to call it, bloodshed - inevitable. So his main point that the revolution could have been peaceful, without civil war, if the reformists had acted decisively or in a revolutionary manner is beside the point.
If we must be critical of Alan Woods then we must also be critical of Lenin. The possibility that the masses could pressure the reformists into taking power was a serious error. This was the lesson of the July days. Half a million workers and soldiers in Petrograd took to the streets and demanded that the reformists take the power when it was given to them. No greater pressure on reformists could be imagined than this semi-insurrection. It proved Lenin wrong on the peaceful development of the revolution through pressure on the reformists. The Bolshevik tactic lagged behind the consciousness of the masses, as Trotsky’s historical account demonstrates. The anger and frustration of the masses with the constitutional soviet majority was wasted.
Whether the Bolsheviks should have attempted to take power in July is a moot point. Certainly Trotsky debates with himself over a number of pages on this question in his great History of the Russian Revolution, before answering in the negative due to his opinion that the provinces were not ready. Although he does concede that events in Petrograd and Moscow were decisive for both the February and October revolution.
Perhaps the real question is what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had prepared and planned earlier for the path of eventual insurrection. The Russian Revolution might have taken a more open, popular mass character some months earlier, as Trotsky speculates.
Barrie Biddulph
Stoke-on-Trent
Sloppy polemics
One should, I suppose, expect sloppy polemics and an utterly cavalier attitude towards the truth from correspondents such as Laurens Otter, Barrie Biddulph and Paul Anderson (Letters, November 14). A representative sample from each.
In the name of syndicalism comrade Otter breezily writes of our “professed Trotskyism”. Pardon? Some CPGB members do adhere to Trotskyism, but certainly not myself and most others. Then there is comrade Biddulph. He says that for Jack Conrad “the real choice is economism or bourgeois democracy. Parliament or wages struggles.” When have I ever said such a stupid thing? Needless to say, I never have. The comrade simply makes it up as he goes along so, as to justify his brittle leftism. What about comrade Anderson? For this left nationalist the idea that one can advocate Scottish self-determination and simultaneously favour continued working class unity in Britain is “a tad hypocritical”. Well, only for those unwilling to grasp elementary logic and the ABC of socialism.
Such freelance individuals are, of course, impossible to take seriously and no one does, including themselves. In contrast Martin Thomas is a committed revolutionary and a writer of merit who carries real weight on the left. What he says matters. He is after all one of the leading members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and speaks for that organisation on the Socialist Alliance’s executive.
Equally germane, the CPGB and the AWL have cooperated increasingly closely since the comrades involuntarily broke from auto-Labourism and made their welcome turn towards the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party. Fittingly comrade Thomas is a principal co-sponsor of the ‘Call for a Socialist Alliance paper’ which we initiated and I am delighted to see that a number of other respected AWL comrades have lined up alongside him.
Given these promising circumstances, regular readers of these pages must be asking themselves what is going on with the AWL. Indeed I am asking the very same question myself. After all hardly a week seems to pass without comrade Thomas firing off an anti-CPGB polemic. And what sort of polemics? Without exception they are misdirected, diversionary and worryingly petty. Yes, the comrade appears to be engaged in a full-blown anti-unity offensive.
First, he is hysterically accusing the CPGB of “no platforming” the AWL. That after I patiently explained to him on the phone that we had done no such thing. There was a cock-up in Leeds. No conspiracy. Next, he demands that the CPGB prints in full Sean Matgamna’s rambling, 10,000-word ‘Critical notes’ on the CPGB and a 3,500-word diatribe on Leeds. Of course, the AWL cannot be expected to carry such “gossip” in any of its own publications. Why not? Because they normally feature shorter articles! And these comrades say they want to overturn all existing social conditions!
Then comrade Thomas wants me to recant my Stalinist record in the 1980s on the basis of deracinated quotes and unfounded inferences taken from my book From October to August - reprints of speeches and articles over 1983-1991. He pictures me as a fond admirer of JV Stalin, a retrospective tankie celebrating the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1980), one of those who enthusiastically welcomed Wojciech Jaruzelski’s party-army regime of 1981 and a semi-supporter of the State Emergency Committee anti-Yeltsin coup in 1991.
This is a mix of weasely half-truths and downright falsification. I would urge readers to take a look at From October to August and weigh up for themselves whether or not comrade Thomas is being honest or dishonest.
My actual position then was to critically identify with the “left groupings of the 1920s” in the Soviet Union - which broadly corresponded to “the long-term interests of the proletariat” - and to oppose both the forces of capitalist restoration and bureaucratic socialism (J Conrad October to August London 1992, p35).
Hence in reply to comrade Thomas I explained that my basic approach during this 1983-1991 period was broadly in line with “commonplace” Trotskyism. That is, defence of what I then thought were the “historic gains” of the working class - but through advocating socialist democracy and a political revolution against the bureaucracy. Yes, since 1991 my ideas have undergone radical development. But to describe me in the 1980s as a Stalinite is akin to calling black white or white black.
I asked comrade Thomas to define Trotskyism and Stalinism - no answer. I also pointed out that, while the AWL pins upon itself the ‘Trotskyism’ name-tag, its dominant ideology is Shachtmanism, which was lambasted as a “petty bourgeois deviation” by Trotsky himself and ruthlessly hounded out of the so-called Fourth International. In passing, I also reminded the comrade of the AWL’s support for the CIA-sponsored islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in the 1980s who were - yes - called, “my sort of people”, by, I believe, a certain Mark Osborn (another AWL leader - but of the ultra-economistic wing).
Now comrade Thomas says I have evaded the subject. But what is the subject? From my angle comrade Thomas seems to be determined to provoke an argument, any argument. Like some 16-pint drunk he wants a fight ... and anything will serve as an excuse.
So what is motivating the AWL? Frankly, I do not know. The anti-unity offensive is being headed by those who under other circumstances would be regarded as those closest to us politically.
Martin Thomas brands me a Stalinite and a liar. Sean Matgamna rails against the CPGB as a “Mickey Mouse” outfit and says he is “boycotting” the Weekly Worker. We also get the strong impression that the AWL is not intending to go ahead with our three joint schools planned for 2003. I say ‘impression’, because clear, unambiguous, answers are hard to come by.
Perhaps there is some kind of crisis brewing inside the AWL? The comrades have half-broken with auto-Labourism, but where now? At the moment all I can do is to guess at what is going on and hope for a positive outcome which will result in the restoration of healthy relations between us and joint work aimed at a Socialist Alliance paper and unity in a Socialist Alliance party.
Jack Conrad
London
Mark’s mates
A small point in response to Martin Thomas’s letter in last week’s Weekly Worker (November 14). Mark Osborn’s horrifying description of the Afghan mujahedin as “my kind of people” is no “off-the-wall invention”. I only wish it were.
I attended a debate between the CPGB’s John Bridge and Tom Rigby of the AWL in the bowels of Lambeth town hall in Brixton, south London, some years back. A rather excitable comrade Osborn did indeed lay claim to the cutthroat reactionary islamists then fighting in Afghanistan. This at a time when Mark’s mates were flaying the feet of women sent out by the Kabul government to work with peasants in outlying rural areas on literacy initiatives and other such nonsense.
The excuse I have heard from some AWL comrades is that the mujahedin were fighting a national liberation struggle. The content of that struggle, their vision of a ‘liberated’ Afghanistan, was immaterial. The women, workers and progressive forces of Afghanistan must have wondered what they’d done to upset you.
So, Martin, I suggest you stop playing cat’s paw to Sean Matgamna in his attempt to cloud the issues and start explaining why the AWL leadership has mounted this disunity offensive against the CPGB. An offensive you seem more than happy to front.
Andy Gunton
South London
Stalinist?
The AWL - in the person of Martin Thomas - seems determined to prove that the CPGB’s origins in the 1980s were “left Stalinist”. In a recent exchange with CPGBers on an email discussion list, Martin conceded that they were indeed “quirky” Stalinists, but Stalinists nonetheless.
The comrades certainly did have some ‘quirks’ as Stalinists! They rejected socialism in one country, popular fronts, adhered to a version of uninterrupted/permanent revolution, rejected a parliamentary road to socialism, argued for political revolution in what they called the countries of “bureaucratic socialism” and advocated an open party regime with full rights for factions. “Quirky” seems a little understated …
Martin’s method appears to be the selection of some quotes from various writings of Jack Conrad of the time. No context is provided.
Before signing off, perhaps comrade Thomas might care to flick through a copy of Trotsky’s Revolution betrayed from 1936. I can assure him that if - based on a selective reading of some of his pro-Soviet comments - he thinks Jack Conrad was a “Stalinist”, logically he should arrive at exactly the same conclusion about Trotsky himself. As that genuine Stalinist, Harpal Brar, pointed out at a Communist Party school some years back, there are some glowing passages on the USSR in that work too!
Ted Alerton
Email
Spendthrift firefighters
So the firefighters want a 40% pay increase, bringing their pay up to £30,000 a year.
It reminds me of the standing joke that is told when firefighters meet each year at the Fire Brigades Union conference. It goes a bit like this. You can tell which firefighters work in London, and those who work in other parts of the UK, by the car that they drive. Firefighters in Scotland, Wales and the north of England drive BMWs; those in London drive 10-year old Ford Escorts. The firefighters’ dispute can easily be solved by giving firefighters who live in London a ‘weighting’ to compensate for the extra housing costs incurred by living in the capital.
The New Labour Government is far less guilty of feeding the house-price bubble than its Conservative predecessor. Nor has it made the cause of wider home-ownership something of talismanic importance. But it has benefited hugely from the sense of prosperity that buoyant house prices have fostered. The unfortunate consequence of the house-price bubble is that it has priced firefighters out of the housing market in the London area. The coming collapse in house prices will bring the cost of buying a house back down to affordable levels.
If the pay of firefighters were increased to £30,000 a year, they would just spend the extra money on new cars, foreign holidays and bigger houses. That would just make the house-price bubble even bigger. The New Labour government is therefore right to oppose the firefighters’ 40% pay demand.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
Berger
I am very happy that you mentioned John Berger’s text for my parents’ exhibition ‘Miners’ as one of his best short essays (Weekly Worker May 30). I really agree with you. It’s a violent text, as was the strike, and one feels that John is writing with his broken bones.
Both of my parents, Knud and Solwei Stampe, are now deceased. They were on the blacklist in Sweden. We have all the 60 paintings from the exhibition in Sweden on the British miners’ strike and altogether over 300 on the working class in general.
I just wanted to signal my joy at reading your mention of this essay and also to note the fact that Keeping a rendezvous is one of Berger’s books that still hasn’t been published in Sweden. Revolutionary art and writing are still blacklisted here.
Jonas Stampe
Sweden
