Weekly Worker 463 Thursday Janury 16 2003

Letters

War on islam?

In arguing that the CPGB should develop a position of special opposition to islam as one of many religions, Harry Simmons places himself in some very unfortunate political alignments (Letters, January 9).

Expressing his shock that we “grovel around with this most reactionary, vicious religion” and advising us that “sometimes it really is the case that something looking, smelling and sounding like fascism really is fascism”, Harry points us towards a programmatic position that coincides with that of British fascism: cf the attempt by Nick Griffin of the British National Party to forge an “Anti-Muslim Alliance”.

Harry’s letter started off promisingly enough, with his quotation of Karl Marx’s famous observation that “religion is the opium of the people”, but he makes no further reference to this observation and his argument degenerates, with each succeeding paragraph, from the level of the insights of Marx to those of the bar-stool bigot. I would urge comrade Simmons to read the excellent series on ‘Marx and religion’ by the CPGB’s Michael Malkin (Weekly Worker December 21 2000, and February 1, March 1 and March 29 2001).

Karl Marx was a militant atheist who opposed all religious superstition. He did so because he despised doctrines which required the submission, abasement and denigration of humankind. The idea of the existence of gods came from the minds of human beings. The concept that men and women should then worship, bow down before and submit to their own mental objects, that we should pronounce what we had created to have created us, was to Marx an absurdity. But at the same time, Marx recognised that religious belief was an alienated expression of human hatred of oppression. The quotation Harry uses was actually preceded by Marx’s observation that, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances”.

The Communist manifesto does indeed pronounce that communism will abolish religion, but anyone who thinks that this meant that Marx was for the suppression of organised religion as a whole, or a war against any particular religion such as comrade Simmons is suggesting, or that he would have approved, for instance, of the forced church closures by the likes of Enver Hoxha in Albania, does not understand Karl Marx and communist politics.

Comrade Malkin demonstrates how Marx, right from his earliest writings, took the approach that he did not seek to destroy the gods of the multitudes, but to foist the doctrines of the multitudes onto the gods. In part four of the aforementioned series, just what Marx meant exactly by the abolition of religion is explained, with the quotation of some of the very purplest of prose from the great man: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is the demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo religion is.”

Islam today is the majority religion of the most oppressed people on the planet. Judeo-christianity is the majority religion of the oppressors. Mirroring the ‘jihadists’, comrade Simmons advocates communists taking the same side as the oppressors in a religious war. It is only a short logical step from this to an advocacy of taking the side of the US and British ruling classes in a shooting war. Your advice is to no avail, comrade Simmons. As communists we attack not the illusion, but the condition which requires illusion.

The position taken by comrade Ian Donovan in the recent debate in the columns of Weekly Worker is the correct one. We should be proud to march against imperialist war and against the appalling oppression suffered by the Palestinian people, with muslims and Arabs and, in the process of doing so, we should seek to ‘contaminate’ the religious amongst them “with progressive, socialist literature and speech” (Weekly Worker December 5 2002).

John Pearson
Manchester

Popular fronts

My letter is in response to the excellent article, ‘Marxist analysis or crying wolf’, by Ian Donovan, in which he comprehensively destroys the arguments of Martyn Hudson (Weekly Worker January 9). In this article Ian correctly identifies the difference between united fronts and popular fronts.

I was reading this article while attending the Stop the War Coalition conference in London and a question for Ian sprung to mind as I listened to the proceedings. In the light of the restriction of the demands of the coalition to reformist pacifism, along with the main line of the conference being to put pressure on our capitalist government to be a nicer imperialism, as well as the enthusiasm shown for incorporating bourgeois groups such as the Liberal Democrats, does Ian consider the STWC to be a united front or a popular front? And if, as seems clear to me, it has developed into a popular front is it not now the time for communists to openly campaign for a class line to be drawn and therefore that the political support given by the CPGB to the STWC popular front should be withdrawn?

I was also impressed by Ian’s sophisticated analysis of the complexity of the political problems involved in winning the working class from islam to a revolutionary proletarian consciousness. In this context I wonder if he really agrees with the stageist ‘two-state’ solution to the problems of Israel/Palestine put forward by Peter Manson in the article ‘Unity for two states’ in the same issue. If, as Peter himself argues, it is only through the working class (both Israeli and Palestinian) being won to a democratic project, and by implication having the power to impose that on the reactionary bourgeois forces of both sides, why does it make sense to advocate two bourgeois states as a necessary stage as the CPGB do?

Surely if it is possible for the working class to impose a programme of extreme democracy on the bourgeoisie then we are talking about a revolutionary solution within which the question of state boundaries is necessarily secondary and the slogans regarding them should be much more algebraic.

If comrades are affronted by my describing Peter’s argument as stageist I would ask them to consider how else do they interpret his conclusion to the article. He refers to the two-state solution “surely bringing nearer the day when Palestinian Arabs and Israeli jews can live side by side as fellow-fighters for freedom and full human self-development” - ie, socialism. Bourgeois democratic states for now, and then, at some unknown time in the future, we get socialism - sounds like good old Stalinist/Menshevik stages to me.

Also, as a small side point, why the capital ‘A’ for ‘Arabs’ and the lower case ‘j’ for ‘jew’?

Brian Walters
email

Childish

I intend to respond to Ian Donovan’s article in a much more sustained manner, particularly in regard to the nature of political religious forces and how we orient to them on the left. There are three issues I would like to clear up now, however, before the debate turns into one of Ian’s little projects of misrepresentation.

Firstly, there is no confusion about the nature of united and popular fronts in my analysis. My contention is it is neither desirable nor possible to construct a united front with political islamists - the shift to a popular front tactic is the danger - particularly for the Socialist Workers Party and their abdication of an independent working class politics in favour of tailing the worst aspects of reactionary islamism.

Secondly, I was not siding with any particular faction of islam: I was simply pointing to Ian’s incapacity to distinguish between these factions. I am not siding with traditional islam against political islam: simply pointing out that the latter is a recent phenomenon largely born out of reactions to Zionism, imperialism and the failure of the left to make revolutions in these societies. I have no “strategic conception” of siding with the traditionalists: only that of not working with the islamists. The anti-war movement in Pakistan, for example, refuses to work with them for the very obvious reason that they are clerico-fascists with whom it is impossible to construct any kind of united front.

In addition, nowhere did I make the point that political islam was non-islam, as Ian has me stating. In any case, I intend to continue with my “islamophobic sectarianism”, as Ian would have it, in the next issue, now I have put these misrepresentations to rest.

I would like to make a third point, however, to do with Ian’s criticism of my terminology. Ian’s rather elementary errors are really a product of his own ignorance about political islam - if he had bothered to read the recent piece by Dave Osler in Solidarity on Saudi Arabia or Clive Bradley’s recent work on political islam in both Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty he would see that the kinds of arguments I put forward aren’t rocket science. It is Ian’s failure to properly research these issues that leads to his misunderstandings, not, as he says, my “obscurantism”, “confusionism”, and so on. Calling my analysis non-Marxist because I want to clear-sightedly understand the complexity of contemporary islam is just childish.

The taunts of ‘academic!’ being thrown at me are more reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge murdering people who wear glasses than grown-up debates in a sophisticated Marxist newspaper. Perhaps Ian’s ortho-Trot conception of national liberation and the oppressed would have him co-sponsoring demonstrations with the Khmer Rouge as a, however distorted, manifestation of the politics of the oppressed and thwarted national-liberationist intent. The return to year zero is also the intent of the islamists and also bear in mind that the Muslim Association of Britain is a manifestation of ruling class finance, ideas and practice in the Middle East and not the voice of the wretched of the earth.

In any case my ideas and vocabulary are rooted in the best of our Marxist tradition - unlike the degenerated language, insults and wilful slanders of orthodox Trotskyism which I thought Ian had transcended over recent years.

Martyn Hudson
Teesside

Correction 1

As regards my article about the Birmingham STWC AGM, I would like to point out it was entirely a personal view (Weekly Worker January 9).

Just to clarify: the split in Birmingham is between the SWP-controlled Stop the War Coalition and the democratic Stop the War Network. ‘Bust’ is a separate anti-war society at Birmingham University.

Steve Davies
Birmingham

Correction 2

Though I agree with the broad thrust of Steve Davies’s article, he is wrong when he says the delegate forums will meet every six months. I am in no way suggesting that this is deliberate on his part, but the SWP stitch-up is more complicated and devious than his article may imply.

The December open meeting of the Birmingham STWC was the first such meeting since February 5 2002. In the intervening period, the coalition (as opposed to the network) has been run by a cabal of leading SWP members, Socialist Action and various islamic forces grouped around the chair, Salma Yaqoob.

What was passed by (the admittedly overwhelming majority) of those present at the December meeting is that the next open meeting of the STWC for all supporters will be held in six months, by which time everything could well be over. In the meantime, decisions will be taken by a delegate forum that will meet every fortnight initially and will decide itself if it wishes to continue with this frequency. Needless to say, the delegates will be made up of SWP members from the numerous, largely inactive, tiny and stillborn SWP-controlled local groups that have suddenly, coincidentally, sprung up across the city. It will not be a body for holding the executive to account by any stretch of the imagination.

Still more disturbing is that the old executive was re-elected that evening without giving any date as to when fresh elections must mandatorily take place.

There is no question that in order to move forward the Birmingham STWC must open up to debate and discussion and basic norms of democracy and desist from the persecution, slanders, slurs and character assassinations of anti-fundamentalist muslims and principled leftists who refuse to politically ally with reactionary islamist forces but maintain an anti-imperialist stance, as opposed to the disgraceful (but not wholly unexpected) capitulation of the SWP.

James Cunningham
South Birmingham SA

Diversion

The US monopoly capitalists are trying to divert the attention of the working and lower middle classes in the USA away from the deepest economic crisis that it has faced since the depression of the 1920s.

This is one of the main reasons behind the looming war on Iraq. Therefore the monopoly capitalist-controlled media are trying to psychologically prepare the working and middle classes of the world for a war on Iraq. We are supposed to believe that Saddam Hussein and his army is a threat to ‘world peace’! What little threat there was had been dismantled by the UN inspectors between 1991 and 1998. If there had been any so-called weapons of mass destruction, we would long ago have heard of this in the headlines of the capitalist media. For the moment, the only ones with the weapons of mass destruction appear to be the US, UK, Germany, France, Chinese, Russian and Israeli regimes!

Due to imperialist control of the UN, the allegations that the UN inspectors are spying on the Iraqi military must be seriously considered. The United Nations is not a neutral party in the whole affair, as it is its sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children due to the blocking of medical supplies. Meantime the Iraqi elite have continued to live in luxury. The giant companies in the US, UK, Germany, France, China and Russia are all competing with one another for a piece of control over the Iraqi economy.

Why does imperialism want a war on Iraq? What they are arguing about is who controls the oil, who gets the contracts to rebuild the oil refineries after the war and such detail. If there is no reason for a war, they are sure to manufacture a reason. It is not for nothing that the US regime has set up the “Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group”. Its aim is to provoke ‘terrorist’ attacks which will then require ‘counter-attack’ from the US on countries harbouring the ‘terrorists’. In short this is a special unit that can manufacture a reason for war or invasions. The UK, Israeli, French and German regimes all have similar secret structures.

There is huge over-capacity in the world economy, and investors from all over the world have huge amounts of money in the US economy that is in decline. For some time now there has been a deep economic crisis in the US. A huge component of the US economy is the military industrial complex. The bottom line is that the military industrialists need a war to boost their decreasing profits. Indeed immediately after the September 11 attacks Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was demanding a war on Iraq. They only stopped then because they had not yet laid the psychological groundwork.

The US working and middle class have been so brainwashed into thinking that they are under threat that sufficient numbers of them are providing political support to the murderous plans of the monopolies, with George Bush as their spokesman. Such has been the political damage done by ‘terror’ groups that through their indiscriminate choice of targets where workers and the lower middle class get hit, the capitalist parasites take advantage of this.

The capitalist media has also helped to drive the US working and middle classes into the arms of reaction. A wedge has been driven between the US and UK working class on the one hand and the working classes in the neo-colonial world on the other.

The second important reason why the US wants to wage a war on Iraq is that they want to impose a puppet regime that is directly under their control, much like in Afghanistan. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia. The US economy is heavily dependent on imported oil, including that from Iraq. Anti-imperialist feeling is growing among the world working classes, not least in the Middle East. If there were to be a popular overthrow of the Saddam regime and the indirect control of imperialism over Iraq broken, this would be a devastating blow to the already shaky US economy. Even the coming to power of an islamic regime that is not under direct imperialist control would pose problems for US monopoly capital. (Such a regime would not be pro-working class but may, as in the case of Iran, pose as anti-imperialist). Any overthrow in Iraq will directly impact on Saudi Arabia where the regime is under enormous anti-imperialist pressure from the masses.

Recently the North Korean regime expelled UN nuclear inspectors. Yet the US does not threaten it with war as they do Iraq. Firstly, North Korea has no oil. Secondly, North Korea is an ally of China and any attack on them will severely undermine the huge US investments there. Whether it is a formal ‘democracy’ or military or Stalinist dictatorship, for US imperialism the bottom line is that they will only tolerate complete subservience to their domination and exploitation of the working classes.

We call for the setting up of anti-imperialist fronts across the world, of the broadest possible forces to stop imperialism in their tracks. The Vietnamese working class and peasants halted them; the Venezuelan workers stopped their coup; the world working classes have the power to stop the slaughter in Iraq. Only the Iraqi people led by the working class can decide their destiny.

Workers International Vanguard League
Cape Town

Not so bad

In reply to Roger Conway’s letter, I’m 15 too, and I’ve only been around the revolutionary left for a couple of years (Weekly Worker December 19). I am not, therefore, the most scholarly of people in the world with regard to the left, but you asked for feedback, so here goes.

Yes - many stereotypes and misconceptions abound concerning the left. Most of these are rooted in McCarthyism or cold war espionage romanticism. While I agree that these stereotypes should be combated, we on the left should do this through active political campaigning - showing what we’re really about - rather than some kind of flashy image revamp.

The fact that some working class people now believe that fascism offers a solution to their problems represents a failure of the left in general to remember that the working class is what we’re about. “No interests separate and apart from those of the working class as a whole,” says the Communist manifesto. This is not a call for proletarian populism - it’s a call to remember that the working class is the revolutionary class, and that their emancipation is also the emancipation of all humankind, regardless of age, sex or ‘race’.

The left must, before it can build anything significant, take a good long look at itself and consider some of the difficulties within it. You mention many of them - pedantry, fragmentation, disunity, and overuse of ‘left jargon’. We have to look at the left we have, and think about how we can build from it the left we want and need.

Stalinism, certainly, has no place. It is an insidious, asinine ideology, bearing more in common with Nazism than Marxism. Sections of the left must shed their Stalinist baggage if progress is to be made.

Left pedantry, which you pick up on, must also be considered. The aftermath of ‘Leedsgate’ (an issue with which you may or may not be familiar) is a prime example of how quickly the left can lose sight of what you call “the meat of the issue” and descend into pathetic bitching. (The “meat of the issue” in this case, was democracy, a value that must be 100% central to anything and everything the left is and can be.)

I agree with you that the vast majority of youth have no idea about leftwing ideologies, nor indeed any ideologies. The closest they come to learning about communism is by buying some ‘CCCP’ sportswear. But things are not quite as bad as you suggest, comrade, because there is a growing youth movement - the anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation, anti-war movement - that could become very radical and maybe even revolutionary. It is, as yet, largely politically undefined, and the left must - and I do mean must - get out there and assert that we offer an alternative to all the things they’re ‘anti’.

It can be depressing for young revolutionaries like you and me when we are faced with the confusing mess of acronyms and ‘little parties’ that the left can sometimes seem. Unity is strength, and the left must unite in such a way that differences can be debated democratically and commonalties built upon.

I am a Socialist Alliance member and supporter, and I would strongly recommend you join the SA. It is not perfect by any means, but much good work can be done within it, as long as those on the left with any sense join forces to stop the SA being (further) hijacked into the SWP’s electoral front.

The left can, and will be, a true revolutionary force, but to make it thus we must work. We must work within the trade unions, within elections and within anti-war and anti-capitalist campaigns. We have to shed ‘left introversion’. We need to come out of the smoky backrooms of city pubs and onto the streets.

A better world is possible. We must now begin to build it.

Daniel Randall
Nottingham

Forced Welsh

The advent of the national assembly of Wales seems to have had very little impact on the life of the people of Wales. The effects on the day-to-day lives of many in the principality seem unchanged by the ramblings and political point-scoring in Cardiff.

However, for one group, the impact of decisions made by the nationalistic assembly has been great. The study of Welsh, in all schools, has been compulsory to the age of 14 for many years, but the assembly made the decision to make the teaching of Welsh compulsory to all those in statutory education in Wales, regardless of their background or ability. The problem of course is not only that the study of Welsh is compulsory, but also that the choices for the individual are denied. Most young people have no wish to continue with their study of Welsh past the age of 14: in fact many don’t wish to learn the language at all.

Forcing youngsters to study a minority language, for some perverse nationalistic reason, only results in disillusionment and boredom with the whole education system and ultimately with life itself. Many young people are already forced into academic study which they neither need nor want. We should be training these individuals for a fulfilling life, not showing them, at such a young age, a life of disillusionment with little hope for the future.

The CPGB’s stance on this matter seems a little confusing. The ‘Draft programme’ calls for measures to encourage the full development of Gaelic and Welsh cultural life. Is this what the assembly would say it was trying to do by insisting all young people in Wales learn the language? Can we support the forced learning of a minority language to the detriment of a whole generation?

To further exacerbate the situation, a significant minority of children in Wales are now taught in Welsh-language schools. This growth is seen by politicians and nationalists as a sign of the resurgence of the language. However, they seem to ignore the real reason for the popularity of such schools. Although some children are from Welsh-speaking families, the vast majority are there because their parents realise the economic and educational advantages to be gained from attendance at Welsh-medium schools. Attendance at a Welsh language school gives the same advantages to people in Wales as private schools do in England.

No group of people should be given such a big advantage over another. On the one hand, those taught through the medium of Welsh have an economic advantage. On the other, those from English-speaking schools are educationally disadvantaged by the narrowing of the curriculum to accommodate compulsory Welsh lessons. This is surely something we, as communists, should not only be aware of, but should also be striving to change.

Sue Osborne
email

Lernu!

There is a multitude of information on the internet about the democratic and practical international language, Esperanto, and many websites and discussion lists using it. Web users who wish to find out about the language, or to learn it at no cost, can click into a new website, ‘Lernu!’ (meaning ‘Learn!’), which was launched on December 21 2002, initially in seven national languages.

Stan Keable
email

Snow White

The Socialist Alliance is like Snow White and the seven dwarfs. Snow White can do without the seven dwarfs. The seven dwarfs cannot do without Snow White. As the poet Byron might have put it:

The Socialist Alliance is of the SWP a thing apart

Tis the other members’ whole existence

The SWP willingly accepts the assistance of the smaller parties and groups and the individuals when its candidates engage in such high-profile contests as that of Paul Foot for mayor of Hackney. It is a small sacrifice for the SWP to send a few footloose members to help out elsewhere in return.

The SWP has the other members of the SA over a barrel. Without the SWP the SA has less total membership than the Socialist Labour Party; and, like the seven dwarfs themselves, the constituent groups and individuals of the SA have their differences.

Ivor Kenna
North London

New editor

I thought Mark Fischer’s article on gun crimes contained some useful information (Weekly Worker January 9). But he’s wrong about the working class needing a gun culture. It’s that sort of headline that gives the left a bad name among workers and the masses.

The working class doesn’t need guns, or drugs or the crime that goes with it. Gun crimes affect working class people, usually black. The situation of the black working class is not that wonderful. A lot of them do the best they can under extreme hardship.

The value system we live in says that unless we have middle class jobs, income and lifestyle we are nothing. Too many black people will be denied access to well paid jobs. So crime is a temptation. The system fails too many. More work needs to be done to turn things around for black youths.

If the guns and drugs weren’t there, the temptations wouldn’t be there. Black youths would be able to do things to develop themselves in a positive direction. This is of course dangerous for the establishment, who appear to need scapegoats and sensationalism to survive and keep the masses from thinking too deeply.

When workers get arms under socialism or a partisan movement, it is controlled through a central committee. Like the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea or Cuba, citizens are consciously trained to defend themselves against invaders and their allies. But what we have with Mark is moving towards anarchy, and that benefits no-one who is working class - go and see Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.

We don’t live under welfare for the working class, but socialism for the rich. They can pay for private protection, armoured cars and electronic gates. We need proletarian democracy: ie, not the rich and the middle classes telling us what to do or claiming to act on our behalf, but us making our own decisions, good or bad, and being responsible for ourselves. Yes, every cook is a chef. We are not a nation of illiterate peasants or serfs, but a nation of disciplined, determined and articulate workers (with the exception of the usual suspects of exploiters and joy-riders).

It’s just there is a constant diatribe telling us we are not capable of government, independent of the bourgeoisie and their allies. And that our mission as a class is not to liberate ourselves, but to be consumers and spectators of whatever rubbish is being given out to us. Freedom for us means disenfranchising, neutralising and getting rid of them.

In my opinion The Leninist became more populist at a time when there was a vacuum on the left after the end of the USSR. You’ve had your chances and abused them. There is a real need for Leninism in this country. Leninism today needs to be developed and woven into working class politics.

To make your contribution, you need a new editor and a new paper.

Gina Hadsworth
email

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