Weekly Worker 462 Thursday Janury 9 2003
Letters
Eternal nations?
Comrade Paul Anderson wants workers’ unity (Weekly Worker December 19). That is the saving grace of his confused and ineffective misrepresentation of the positions taken by Jack Conrad and the CPGB on the national question. The falsehoods he presents cut no ice with those of us familiar with the CPGB’s anti-chauvinist, democratic programme for working class unity through self-determination. But comrade Anderson is evidently deceiving himself. His ‘Leninist’ spectacles are thoroughly steamed up with nationalist mist, and his letter shows us just how blurred is his vision.
1. Comrade Conrad does not “ignore completely” Lenin’s view that separation can, in some circumstances, strengthen workers’ unity. On the contrary, this is precisely our view with respect to Britain and Ireland.
2. Comrade Conrad is not opposed to “the advocacy of self-determination”, but explicitly upholds it in all his writings. It is the advocacy of separatism that we oppose, and the separation of Scotland from the rest of Britain. We support the right of Scotland to separate from England and Wales - and we support the right of Scotland to stay united with England and Wales. But we advocate staying together. We fight for voluntary unity, underpinned by the right to separate.
3. Lenin’s charge of “acting in a pedantic and philistine manner” is directed against those who reject the right of self-determination, treating it as a diversion from class struggle. In reality, wherever a national movement exists, upholding the right to self-determination is a precondition for winning working class unity.
4. Comrade Conrad does not “posit Scottish and Welsh democratic aspirations as false consciousness” (comrade Anderson asserts this without any quotation). On the contrary, we recognise the democratic deficit - the unity of the UK is not voluntary. Alongside British withdrawal from Ireland, we fight for the voluntary unity of England, Scotland and Wales in a federal republic in which each part has the constitutional right to secede - or to stay.
Despite his reference to class unity, one cannot help wondering what exactly are comrade Anderson’s “aspirations” and “desires” for humanity. Is his a nationalist vision of a free, independent and eternal Scotland, with an equal place in the world community of eternally separate nations - or is it the communist vision in which nations merge and dissolve into one human community?
Stan Keable
London
Wrong path
Jack Conrad, the theoretical mouthpiece of the party centre, is leading the CPGB down the wrong path. He is deviating from the economic determinism of classical Marxism, replacing it with a political economism.
Witness the statement: “The Socialist Alliance must prioritise the political training ... of the working class and develop its political consciousness” (Towards a Socialist Alliance party London 2001, p22). Truth: political consciousness arises out of conscious existence. Conscious existence is determined by life, by material conditions, the economic intercourse of men. Once the material conditions become fetters upon themselves, once proletarians become oppressed by capital, so understanding of material conditions is achieved: that is, conscious existence is realised en masse. The understanding of experience - driven by capital’s relationship to wage labour, in its extreme form during a crisis of capital - gives rise to the proletarian’s cognisance of the material conditions in which he lives. He achieves conscious existence and in doing so political consciousness is achieved.
Again a statement by Jack Conrad: “We cannot develop the political consciousness of the working class without having answers to all democratic shortfalls and exposing all cases of injustice” (p23). As we have just seen, we do not develop the political consciousness of the working class; rather it is done mechanistically by the relationship between experience and conscious existence. The political superstructure cannot develop political consciousness: this can only come from the economic sphere in conjunction with the political sphere, in that order. That is, the state’s action in opposition to a strike wave and mass strike shall determine whether revolution is unleashed by history or not.
Jack Conrad elsewhere argues that: “... the communist revolution begins as a political act by an oppressed class” (CPGB draft programme). Comrade Ian Donovan misunderstood the mass strike and its role in the proletarian revolution; Jack Conrad simply ignores it. It is through the mass strike that the revolution is realised. It is due to the mass strike that the worker evolves rapidly from a wage slave to a revolutionary. It and it alone serves to awaken the revolutionary consciousness of the proletarian. The communist revolution begins as a strike wave that becomes ever more politicised, owing to negative state reactions, turning from strike wave to mass strike and inevitably into open revolution.
To conclude, Jack Conrad obsessively downplays economic demands and prioritises political issues, but still he states that “Everyone knows the CPGB does not ignore or dismiss economic demands” (Towards a Socialist Alliance party p25). He then goes on to justify his conclusions by “having answers to all democratic shortfalls and exposing all cases of injustice” on the false premise that “in and of themselves they [economic issues] are containable within the wage-capital loop of bourgeois society”. There is no circuit breaker save that of “a more generous democracy” (ibid).
I have severe reservations about Jack Conrad’s theory that by focusing upon every “democratic shortfall” of capitalism (of which there are many) we shall as a party bring about a communist revolution. My justification: it is the real basis of society, the economic substructure, where revolutionary consciousness arises, not in Jack Conrad’s demands for extending formal bourgeois democracy, or his continuous struggle to place political demands first.
Jack Conrad has, and sadly will again and again, place political questions above and beyond economic issues, much to my dismay.
Richard Sherratt
email
Age of consent
I too find John Hughes’s arguments against Blunkett’s planned change on the age of consent dubious and distasteful and would question his motives over the issue (Weekly Worker December 5).
I find it highly unlikely that an individual under 11 years of age can freely enter into a sexual encounter with an adult, as stated by Hughes. However, I would support comrade Ian Donovan’s comments (Weekly Worker December 19) that it would be wrong to censor Hughes’s words for the reasons comrade Donovan outlined.
This shouldn’t distract any of us from the central issue though - whether the CPGB’s position concerning the removal of the age of consent is correct. I think it is.
With or without an age of consent, child sex abuse would still occur. However, as we all appear to acknowledge that the problem of paedophilia is exaggerated by the bourgeois media, figures also highlight that the idea of a playground pervert preying on young boys and girls at nearly every infant school and park couldn’t be further from the truth. Although I was unable to obtain more up-to-date figures, according to home office statistics, out of a total of around 6,000 convictions for sexual offences in 1997, 894 of these were against children, tried under the ‘under 16’ law. The home office also reported that “many more” sex convictions against children were tried under the broader offences of rape or indecent assault.
Unfortunately, the home office fails to keep accurate records on an issue that initiates such a public outcry, but a rough estimate is that about 2,000 of all known sexual offences occur against children. As most child abuse occurs within the family and thus goes largely unreported, this figure highlights those paedophiles who are more overt in their actions. Of course, the fact that there is a figure at all is disturbing, but it does indicate that the ‘playground pervert’ problem is not one that is prevalent.
I personally find individuals who have been convicted of sex offences against children sad and pathetic and their actions deplorable. But I also find the bourgeois media’s often used hype and encouragement of a national panic over the issue a dangerous one - particularly when we hear of an increase in the number of innocent parents being brought under police custody on the hunch of social workers that they may have been involved in sexually abusing their children. Having said that though, I maintain that it is not irrational or necessarily sexually exploitative for an adult to have a loving sexual relationship with a 14-year-old, for example, without it being labelled by others as the crime of the century. There are going to be occasions when that is simply not the case.
Finally, I think it is important to point out that I am not against laws that are designed to protect individuals of any age from abuse, including sexual abuse, from others within society. It would be farcical if we thought otherwise.
Bob Paul
East London
Gay children
The cover-up of the homophobic treatment of Damilola Taylor is a truly shocking example of how the anti-gay bullying of young kids is swept under the carpet.
Damilola’s mother told The Independent that he had been the victim of an assault a few days before the fatal attack. His assailants accused him of being gay. Other newspapers, including The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, as well as BBC news, reported that Damilola suffered homophobic bullying and taunts of “gay boy”. But the media coverage of the trial and the subsequent investigation into the failed prosecution - led by the bishop of Birmingham, John Sentamu - blanked out these crucial facts and failed to even consider any possible links between the anti-gay bullying of Damilola and his subsequent murder.
If Damilola had been bullied because of his race, racism would have become a major focus in the police investigation and the bishop’s inquiry - as it was in the Stephen Lawrence case, which resulted in demands for action against institutional racism. But because Damilola’s bullying was homophobic - not racist - it was ignored by everyone. There has been no condemnation of the institutional homophobia of the police, school and church.
Whether Damilola was gay, or merely perceived to be gay, is not the issue. Why was his murder not treated as a possible hate crime and why will no one acknowledge the atmosphere of homophobia that surrounded Damilola’s last days? This silence is evidence that the public is unwilling to confront the reality of gay children as well as the abuse faced by children who are either gay or perceived to be gay.
Social denial and prejudice renders gay children invisible. People are willing to accept the existence of gay adults because they believe sexual orientation is a purely behavioural issue, and only an active (same) sex-life is ‘proof’ of a person’s sexuality. Since most experts agree that sexual orientation is set either before birth or in early life, gay children must exist. Most gay people, when asked when they first knew they were gay, will tell you that they felt ‘different’ ever since they could remember. While society seems ready to address the concerns of gay adults, heterosexual parents seem to be in denial that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of them will have gay children.
The needs of gay children are completely ignored, and when one of them dies, as Damilola did - perhaps because he was either gay or perceived to be gay - the police, church, media and government rush around trying to find other reasons and excuses.
The Damilola Taylor case has been projected as primarily a race and immigration issue. There are serious problems about how the police handle crimes in the black community and how immigrants are treated. These are very important questions, but this should not mean that the obvious is ignored.
Peter Tatchell
Outrage
Darwinism
Mike Macnair’s review of the most recent publication from Stephen Jay Gould comes across a bit confusing (‘Darwinism and Marxism’ Weekly Worker December 19). The core question is simply this: what is the practical relationship between ‘dialectical biology’, as practised by Gould and others, and the politics of everyday struggle?
My feeling is that much political discussion among Marxists is so often caught up within itself such that it tends to beat a well-trodden path. Captioned by endless references to text and the ‘lessons of the past’, it is sometimes blinkered to what is really happening. It can be hampered by habit.
By turning to Gould and his kin, as well as brilliant synthesisers of dialectical materialism such as the psychologists, Vygotsky and Luria, the core method of Marxism rather than its seeming stale formulas is replenished. Rather than being an offhand label, ‘historical materialism’ becomes part of a truly broad and universal science that tries to ascend relentlessly to the concrete - not just of human history, but of everything.
Dave Riley
email
Punctuated hogwash
What hogwash. There’s nothing like muddle on the left, when the scent of ‘bad theory’ takes over. Darwinism has confused Marxism from the very beginning and obviously caught Marx off guard. He was unable to successfully prevent what he could clearly see was a problematic theory, but whose surging popularity was hard to reckon with and which was soon a Second International favourite. This had disastrous results in a variant of social Darwinism applied to mass murder on a class basis.
The liberators from ideology were paralysed by this theory and creationist fundamentalists ended up taking up the critique. It was a clear case of ‘guard dogs that won’t bark’. The ideological strain in Darwinian selectionism is so obvious that massive efforts of propaganda added to ostrich worship are required to keep people confused enough to believe in it. It was obvious that capitalist ideology and selectionist conflict theory were married in hell, and the confusion stuck because it is hard to conceive of real evolution, and because, among Marxists, the obsession with reductionist materialism is so great that Darwin’s theory is useful in religion-bashing.
The theory of punctuated equilibrium is one of the greatest of botched ideas, and has never been properly clarified, and is not likely to be so clarified within the context of conventional Darwinism. As far as one can tell, Gould lost his nerve and compromised/backed down from his original claims - witness the obscurity of the argument in his The structure of evolutionary theory. Go read Niles Eldridge’s Myths of human evolution for a possible glimpse of what these fellows were originally talking about (at least in history). Eldridge won’t even cite this book any more in his notes.
The mystique of evolution/revolution makes this thinking suspect, a statement neither left nor right. The ‘theory’ of revolution, confused Hegelian dialectic and the rest of it can only throw further discredit on ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and the Marxist propensity to accept half-baked thinking if it confuses enough troopers to be useful as ‘standard violent revolution’ ideology. This is not a rejection as such of Marxism one way or the other, but all these confused theories do no one any good, and have spoiled the real basis of punctuated equilibrium as a concept. Gould was at least consistent in his thinking, but his failure to deal with directional evolution made punctuated equilibrium a substitute, but one that never clarified the issues.
The eonic model gives a comprehensive treatment of such an idea (indirectly, the term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ is disowned, and is spoilt beyond repair) applied to history. The evidence shows a clear punctuational sequence, speaking descriptively, not theoretically. We actually see phenomena, highly difficult to analyse, in world history that represent ‘punctuation of an equilibrium’, although this has nothing to do with the original (confused) concept.
Grafting punctuated equilibrium onto ‘dialectics’ and a ‘theory of revolution’ is simply a muddle. The correct treatment of revolution requires careful foundations, and can never be used for ideological purposes, a point clearly sensed by Marx with his incipient distinctions of theory and praxis. But theoretical discipline was frittered away here, and the worst-case confusions of ‘teleological thinking’ were standard ideology in thinkers of the Second International.
The legacy of the left in terms of causation/teleology and theories confusing praxis is both chronic and apparently an incurably second-rate laughing stock, and not very funny when used by violent psychopaths. Face it - Marxism foundered here, and no one can even critique it. Thus Marx gave sufficient hints that he was not happy with Darwin’s theory.
Punctuated equilibrium is not going to help anything, because it will simply be reapplied to futuristic historicism in a confusion finished off by Karl Popper. The fallacy in Gould’s thinking can be seen in his collation of standard economic theory and Darwinism, this from a supposed Marxist. The left would like to kid itself here, but Gould was obviously distancing himself.
John Landon
email
Glorious islam
As you may know, over the years islam has been receiving negative coverage from western media. Whether intentional or as a result of ignorance, western media, on many occasions, depicted islam as a violent and unfair religion - something, which is neither true nor justified.
In our efforts to present you with a true picture of islam, the religion of more than a billion people, we attach for you links to several trusted islamic sites that will provide you with all the information you need to know about the true and glorious religion of islam (refer to jubjalyat@mail.com).
We wish you the best of luck and may allah show you the path to true belief.
Jubail Da’Wah Centre
Saudi Arabia
Vicious islam
It is interesting that the word ‘religion’ and not ‘christianity’ is used in the well-worn phrase, “Religion is the opium of the masses”. The difficulty with religion is that the majority of believers are always quite pleasant people - until the bishop, mullah or holy man (or commissar or Gauleiter) gets up on his soap box and starts to preach.
It is sad that the vast majority of muslims live in what is frankly a dark age similar in substance to that of Europe a thousand or so years ago. There may be a tiny minority of westernised and well-educated muslims but they are the equivalent of Church of England adherents - making the right noises at the right time but enjoying a snort of nose powder and a glass of whiskey with the best. If they have any sense they tend to get away from the minarets as quickly as possible!
In reality there are millions of muslims who are ignorant of the world, lied to by their rulers, frightened of anything which smacks of modernity, and have a knowledge of classical Arabic (which is often compared to Chaucer’s ‘English’ in the Canterbury tales), yet have an inability to communicate in their own written language, as in central and southern Asia. These islamic followers have been taught (well, except the women, who don’t get taught anything really) since birth that there is only allah (peace be upon him) and his prophet Muhammad. They exist in a world where there really are people who will kill you for questioning the smallest part of the Quran - let alone blasphemy.
Islam as a philosophy (not just islamicists or islamo-fascists) is, like all religions, against all the ideas and notions of even the most queasy, useless liberal - let alone those who describe themselves as socialist or communist. It is no accident that like Germany post-1933 the first up against the wall wherever islam has assumed a governing role is none other than trade unionists, communists, socialists, anarchists, members of minority sects and critical liberals. The real power in the mess of Palestine is Hezbollah and their islamicist playmates - this bunch of islamo-fascists would happily smallpox every man woman and child to death in Israel!
I am shocked that a communist organisation such as yourselves grovels around with this most reactionary, vicious religion. Being against a religion isn’t racialist: no one has to hate the person to hate the religion. Really, the CPGB should stop fannying around with this most cruel and twisted of religions and start binding together socialists and communists from the Middle East into a cohesive force.
Sometimes it really is the case that something looking, smelling and sounding like fascism really is fascism. Build the alternative future - not prop up the past, which, if Afghanistan was anything to go by should (along with allah and the Quran) be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Harry Simmons
email
SWP mistakes
It’s not good just saying that the Socialist Workers Party’s promotion of the more reactionary kinds of islam is a mistake. After all this is nothing new.
I can remember, on a demonstration against the bombing of Serbia, being physically threatened by SWPers and their military-uniform-wearing, ultra-nationalist, christian Serb ‘comrades’. Why? Because I was part of the internationalist contingent that as well as calling for Nato out of Serbia called for Serbia out of Kosova - the point being that the SWP would rather lash up with all sorts of reactionary and semi-fascist elements if they think they can recruit the odd nationalist christian Serb here or the odd sexist, homophobic muslim youth there.
Simply saying the SWP has made a ‘mistake’ is hardly an adequate strategy for democratic socialists to take.
Victor Currie
email
War hysteria
I am a Canadian living in the USA and the current situation looks like a military dictatorship. The international issues and hysteria inflame and blind those who have been so poorly educated and maintained by the US oligarchy (read, for example, Condorcet’s warnings regarding universal suffrage without universal critical thought - he was speaking about the US back in the 18th century).
I cancelled my two-hour flight home for Christmas last month because I was told I must report to the airport five hours ahead of flight, carry no more than three changes of clothes, all in plastic bags, bring no nail-clippers, tweezers, etc, and not even consider presents or carry anything wrapped). Even so, I was warned that airport security might still hold me as a foreign national well beyond flight time and that nobody but my own subversive self would be responsible.
Bridget Butler
USA
Red herring
I think comrade Liz Hoskings is allowing her understanding of democratic centralism to be coloured by her experience of various groups on the revolutionary left and their internal regimes (Weekly Worker December 19).
The whole party action thing is a bit of a red herring. Her argument neglects what is, for me, the essence of democratic centralism: ie, the principle that opposing views should be allowed to take an organisational form. Without this, only the leadership can promote new ideas. Hence, both discussion and political education become meaningless and sterile. This unwillingness to allow opposing views to gain influence is profoundly unMarxist and leads to a disunity of theory and practice and an inability to relate to the class.
I disagree with her assertion that democratic centralism should be rejected because it is a hierarchical method of organising that in some way reflects the oppression of women. I find this argument quite offensive. If the revolutionary left had been able to relate effectively to the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, thus preventing its degeneration into lifestyle politics, then I doubt that comrade Hoskings would feel this way.
It is important to distinguish between true democratic centralism and the specific form of bureaucratic centralism the left was moving towards at the time.
Ethan Grech
Cardiff
Wind or sun?
There is a fable in which the wind challenges the sun to a competition to see who could get a man to take his coat off first. The harder the wind blows, the more the man is determined to keep his coat on and eventually the wind gives up. At first the sun has no success either, but it shines hotter and brighter and eventually the man, almost without thinking, voluntarily takes his coat off.
Coercion will not create left unity inside the Scottish Socialist Party or the Socialist Alliance. It is more likely to make people defend their platforms and if ‘guidelines’ are then enforced ensure internal war. A wise leadership would loosen the reins, make sure every member, irrespective of background, is treated the same fair way and let time do the rest.
Peter Burton
Edinburgh
AWL joint school
I would respectfully suggest you should not be holding a joint school with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The only appearances on the same platform should be debates on the lines of the Vietnam teach-ins, with the AWL clearly the opponents. They always come up with wrong positions that prove to be totally disastrous, prevent any real opposition to some action by America and its allies and effectively totally support it.
Example - Afghanistan. Whatever the local errors and incompetence of Soviet policy, there was a huge covert operation by the Americans which preceded any Soviet intervention. Carter signed an executive order in June 1989 beefing up all these activities. Brzezinski attached a note to the submission saying this would be bound to bring about Soviet intervention. Asked years later by an interviewer if he had any regrets (loss of life, suffering of the population), he replied, “Hell no, it was a real smart thing to do ... it brought down the Soviet Union and advanced our position in Asia.”
It was also on a vast scale, with Saudi Arabian intelligence agents as front men, recruiting from 35 countries, including America and with a certain Mr bin Laden taken on as a recruiting agent. All this was to prove highly disastrous, particularly for the populations of the other countries, including European ones they were used against and ultimately for America itself, as fundamentalist paramilitaries were unleashed on the world.
The same can be said for the AWL’s positions on other areas of the world -Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, to name but a few. I suggest you should challenge them to a teach-in debate rather than a joint school.
Richard Roper
email
Misadministration
Those who were members of the original CPGB before it dissolved will know some of the characters that form the Communist Party of Britain, whose supporters are grouped around the Morning Star. I admire many of the CPB comrades who have been involved in communist politics for decades.
As a Leninist, I can remember the bitterness over Gorbachev before he dissolved the Soviet Union. British communists have done their own analysis of what went wrong - the Weekly Worker is well clued up on this.
One of the commentators was Andrew Murray, now in the Stop the War Coalition. I have never been able to forget his comments at a meeting in 1993 about what was wrong with the Soviet system. I think he called himself a communist then. He said that one of the problems was that as workers were rarely sacked in the Soviet Union, this did not give them the incentive to work hard. I think he hinted at measures that would make the workers work harder. But no doubt about it: he didn’t think that Soviet workers were exploited enough.
I do not support this view. My view is, with communists like these, who needs capitalists? Too much of the produce of the Soviet economy went on defence. Undoubtedly there was misadministration, which was essentially a political problem. But I am sure that the Soviet workers were productive. If they had proper governance and workers’ participation and less careerism within the Communist Party, the workers in the Soviet Union would have been able to enjoy a three-day week and good living standards.
Gina Hadsworth
email
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