Weekly Worker 464 Thursday January 23 2003

Letters

SWP and islam

As an Iraqi dissident and a member of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, I felt it important to attend, since the war on Iraq concerns people like me more than anyone else. For me it was also important to listen to those who speak on behalf of the Iraqi people, and what analyses, explanations and alternatives are being proposed.

From the very beginning I realised that the conference was totally dominated by the biggest left political group in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, along with the Muslim Association of Britain and the London Muslim Coalition. I started to feel angry and depressed, insomuch as those politicised muslim organisations have always, openly and proudly, supported Osama bin Laden and his terrorist and criminal activities. In addition, they have always been strong believers and followers of the Taliban regime, and they shamelessly welcomed September 11, Bali, the terrorist attacks in Kenya and other terrorist practices of Hamas in Palestine and Jund Allah in Lebanon.

Ironically, political islam is applauded and welcomed by the SWP, while both ordinary muslims in the Middle East and in western society and western people reject it. The SWP cannot understand that political islam was created by the USA for the sole purpose of destroying working class and progressive movements in the Middle East and wiping out all the Marxist and socialist forces. Hence, those politicised muslim organisations should not be given the right to speak in the name of the Iraqi people nor any other country in the Middle East.

The people of Iraq and the Middle East have suffered for a long time at the hands of political islam. For instance, we all have witnessed the existence of the most repressive and barbaric regime in Afghanistan: the Taliban. The people of Afghanistan suffered a great deal of injustice. People of that region are not dancing to the tune of those islamic political organisations, since they understand that under the Taliban, Osama, Hamas, etc, death and the deprivation of rights are a routine part of everyday life; and events such as September 11 are carried out against working people by those groups in the Middle Eastern countries.

Yet at the conference here was one of the speakers from the Muslim Association, while enthusiastically shouting and screaming against US imperialism, proudly attempting to justify the terrorist atrocities in Kenya. However, at the end of his speech he received warm applause. To be honest, I was very surprised, insofar as it is nonsense for left organisations to support Osama bin Laden and his followers - it is not acceptable for any workers’ political party to compromise itself and stand shoulder to shoulder with the most repressive, brutal and inhumane political movement (political islam) in contemporary history.

Sami Mohammad
email

Two movements

Despite the fact I tend to agree with the position of the CPGB PCC on the MAB, I must criticise some points. First, though, I’ll introduce myself: I belong to the political executive of Communist Students, one of the components of the opposition in the Lebanese Communist Party, and I am half Lebanese and half Iraqi.

MAB may be a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, but they have nothing to do with Al Qa’eda and at present their sections do not engage in military attacks (except in Palestine with Hamas). Thus opposing ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’ like the Kenya bombing is not like opposing the islamism of the MAB.

I think anti-war movements outside the Arab world can contain people soft towards the Saddam dictatorship, while in the Arab world it cannot. That is why there are two campaigns: one leftist; another a melting pot. The first is opposed to American imperialism and the regime (my group belongs to this one, so do the pro-SWP individuals in Lebanon).

If I am critical of the SWP’s insistence on squashing criticism, I am also critical of the CPGB PCC’s (and more so the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s) insistence on marking points against the SWP in such a movement as the STWC (both reek of sectarianism).

Finally, the anti-war movement is an anti-war movement - it is not the vanguard brigade of the revolution, so pacifists and Lib Dems are welcome.

Ammar Abboud
email

Two states

Brian Walters raises a couple of pertinent questions in his letter in last week’s paper (Weekly Worker January 16). This was in response to my article ‘Marxist analysis or crying wolf’ on the subject of islamism and the left in the preceding issue (January 9).

He firstly asks if I consider the STWC to be an united front or a popular front, and if the latter whether it is “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?”

My response is that in terms of the forces arranged within it, the STWC is clearly a kind of a united front, not a popular front, whose purpose is only to organise concrete actions (demonstrations, public meetings, etc) to protest against the threat of war with Iraq. It does not pretend to stand for anything more than that; it does not have a programme to counterpose to the status quo as a whole - it does not aspire, for instance, to extend its bloc from the sphere of anti-war protest to the sphere of government, nor does it exist to refurbish the reputation of an existing political party, such as Labour or the Liberal Democrats. So no, it is not a popular front: it is a kind of united front.

The anti-war stance taken by the Liberal Democrats presents the STWC with a problem; however, what it is necessary to avoid is not any contamination per se by episodic joint actions even with them if the necessity arises; rather it is essential that the anti-war movement is vigilant and refuses to be sucked into becoming an auxiliary for their governmental aspirations. The watchword of any practical blocs that the left may enter into with non-revolutionary, non-working class forces is the maintenance of full freedom of revolutionary criticism of those non-working class forces, and the exercise of that freedom of criticism.

The actual problem we face is that the SWP is not, because of its own deep-going political flaws, leading this united front in the manner that Marxists should. The SWP are not reformists who aspire merely to incrementally modify the status quo and therefore ultimately to preserve it; they are not would-be coalition partners of the Lib Dems. They are revolutionary in their general aspirations, but they are also tailists, who are continually looking for a short cut to revolution by riding on the back of some other ‘revolutionary’ force.

This is, of course, a common flaw on the left; at the moment it is manifested by the SWP’s tailism of elements of ‘radical’ islam, as evidenced by their refusal to condemn such things as September 11 and Mombasa, and thereby exercise that freedom of Marxist criticism. This is hardly the mark of popular frontist legalism or cowardice; it is, however, hardly Marxist either. So no, the job of communists is not to lead some ‘political break’ with a non-existent popular front, but on the contrary, to seek to fight for a correct orientation of the would-be revolutionary forces within it, to win them to a consistently revolutionary-democratic position that alone can turn this somewhat dysfunctional proto-united front into a real one in which communist politics can play a leading role and begin to win hegemony.

Brian also sees a contradiction between my own analysis of the problems of combating the influence of ‘radical’ forms of islam on the oppressed masses of the muslim world and winning such masses to a revolutionary consciousness, and the demand for two states advocated by Peter Manson in his article on the Palestinian/Israeli question (January 9). He writes: “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.”

But nowhere does our demand for two states in this situation specify that they must end up being “bourgeois states”. In that sense, our democratic demand for two states is “algebraic”, though not in the sense that comrade Walters means. For comrade Walters, what must be “algebraic” are the specific demands on the national question, not the class nature of the state. We believe that in the right circumstances, any possible separation between the implementation of our democratic demands and the actual revolution could be compressed to zero, and thereby the revolutionary potential that such demands embody could lead to the revolution manifesting itself uninterruptedly: ie, permanently. But to make that a precondition, as for instance the Socialist Party do in their demand for ‘two socialist states’, would be to rob those demands of their democratic edge in the here and now and thereby appear to postpone democracy until after the revolution.

There is an inherent problem with making democratic demands, such as those which claim to embody both Palestinian and Israeli national rights, “algebraic” - that is, using some clever formula that evades the key democratic questions that divide the working class, which in this case is the existence of two nations competing for the same territory. Putting it simply, it gives the appearance that democratic questions are considered secondary. But they are not secondary - the reason that Palestinian and Israeli workers do not struggle together as class brothers and sisters is because they are divided over democratic questions. Unless we can get them to fight for each other’s democratic rights as nations, they will never unite in struggle to overthrow the capitalists. An “algebraic” formula that evades the question of their right to exist as separate nations will be seen as equivocal by both sides, and thereby undercut the potential of democratic demands to bring about class unity.

And the peculiar, dialectical thing about this is that of all the demands that most conceivably might, at some juncture, lead to the Israelis and Palestinians discarding the need to be separate, and coming together in a unitary, most likely proletarian-ruled state, the demand for two states has to be it. Only the experience of fighting for each other’s democratic rights for equal, separate states is likely to undermine the national hatreds enough to make a complete, working class-centred unification of these peoples even remotely possible.

There is nothing stageist about this, nothing that sees an inevitable development of the productive forces under a more ‘democratic’ capitalism as a precondition for a later struggle for socialism. Rather this is Leninism: the existence of particularly acute national hatreds such as are legion in the Middle East are an obstacle to revolutionary class consciousness. The national question must be solved as an integral part of the struggle for socialism, by means of a programme that puts the democratic questions dividing our class to the forefront.

Ian Donovan
South London

Islamic law

Just a brief note on the interview with the MAB (Weekly Worker January 16). The interviewee, when he says that women in Britain only got the right to inherit in the late 19th century, is conflating several different issues. The rules were different for land and moveable property.

In relation to land, between about 1200 and 1925 if there was no will women only inherited if there was no equivalent man - ie, daughters if there was no son, sisters if there was no brother, and so on. The Law of Property Act 1925 removed this law from most land, so that in the absence of a will children, male and female, take in equal shares. There is a complex history in relation to wills of land, which were also prohibited by feudal law (they became possible de facto from the 15th century and de jure from 1540), but once there were wills women could take by will.

In relation to moveable property (‘personalty’) women could inherit, whether by will or in the absence of a will, throughout the history of English law - because this was christian (canon) law (until 1857, when the state took it over).

However, English law until 1882 took the view that a husband acquired by marriage an absolute right to his wife’s personalty - both what she owned at the marriage and what she acquired subsequently - so that, for example, he could force her employer to pay her wages to him (and various other absurdities). It must be the abolition of this rule, by the Married Women’s Property Act 1882, to which the interviewee is referring by “the late 1800s”.

The interviewee is correct to say that women have always been capable of inheriting in Sharia law (though the position was almost certainly different in relation to the quasi-feudal military benefices employed by several muslim states at different periods). It is also the case that married women own property in the main variants of Sharia law. However, since the husband has (at least in Sunni variants) the right to coerce and to imprison his wife and to hold her incommunicado, and she can only divorce him under exceptional circumstances, the position de facto is not unlike that in English law before the 1882 act.

The interviewee is thus to some extent prettifying the Sharia position (the English common law position needs little ‘uglifying’).

Mike Macnair
Oxford

US workers

There is a tendency among people outside of the United States to look upon this country and its citizens with scorn and contempt as of late, due primarily to the latest moves by the dictatorial Bush regime in Washington. For much of the English-speaking world, this perception has been shaped by major media sources, such as Rupert Murdoch’s cable and television networks.

No better example of how the capitalist media is shaping international perception of the United States can be found than the recent statement by the so-called ‘Workers International Vanguard League’ of South Africa in the last issue of the Weekly Worker (January 16). This letter is fraught with errors of perception and understanding that go to the heart of the failures of the ‘orthodox’ left around the world to grasp the period in which we live.

Amidst the standard cookie-cutter phrases about “imperialist control of the UN”, “over-capacity in the world economy” (pardon me? I thought Marxists were concerned with overproduction), and the “military-industrial complex”, one finds a view of the American working class that is obviously defined - in general and in its specifics - by the propaganda campaign organised from the White House.

This is apparent when WIVL writes: “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.”

“Brainwashed”? My first reaction to this statement would be to ask WIVL exactly to which members of “the US working and middle class” (as if they are one entity!) they have spoken. If they actually have spoken to any US citizens at all, my guess is that it would be members of the latter class, and not the former. This is because, if they had spoken to members of the working class from the United States, they would know very well that there is near universal rejection of any war with Iraq among them.

Because of the specifics of my job, I am able to speak with working people from all sectors of our class. In over four months of discussions with American workers, I have yet to find more than a scant handful that are supporting Bush’s dirty little war for profit. Even the most reactionary and backward workers have seen through big capital’s attempts to divert workers’ attentions away from the seething economic crisis. Workers who are traditionally very conservative, workers who are traditionally supporters of the Republican Party, and by no means can be seen as radical or even militant, are beginning to speak up against the threat of war.

Last weekend, on January 11, delegates representing local, regional and national trade union organisations, and local labour anti-war committees, met and formed US Labor Against the War (Uslaw). Uslaw was the product of anti-war organising among the working class that has taken place since the days immediately following September 11 2001, when a cloud of ash and dust still hung over lower Manhattan.

The unions that founded Uslaw represent over two million organised workers and, through the local anti-war committees that are part of Uslaw, a considerable amount of unorganised workers. In the period from then until writing this (January 17), many more labour unions and organisations have endorsed Uslaw, including region 9 of the United Auto Workers, which alone represents over 30,000 working people.

And Uslaw is not the only national coalition of working people organising against the war: only a week before, Workers for Peace was set up, representing thousands of workers in auto, steel and other heavy industry unions.

In spite of an all-sided propaganda blitz by the media, coordinated from the White House, working people are not buying what Washington is selling. Far from “driv[ing] the US working and middle classes into the arms of reaction”, Bush’s war drive has driven those elements into the arms of ... the anti-war movement! Or, as one American political commentator put it, George W Bush has been one of the most effective anti-war organisers this country has seen in over a generation. Through his actions, he has been responsible for putting tens of thousands of people on the streets against war with Iraq. He has done more in four months to build a mass anti-war movement than many grassroots organisers.

Martin Schreader
Detroit

Holocaust Day

Anti-racists, including jewish activists, are intending to hit out on Holocaust Memorial Day at newspapers and politicians, whom they accuse of racism and hypocrisy in the way they affect tears for past victims of persecution while inciting race hatred today. They will demonstrate outside the London offices of the Daily Mail on Monday January 27, singling out this paper for its regular front-page headlines about asylum-speakers, which they say scapegoat these people and inflame hostility against them.

The Mail was accused last year of whipping up a campaign among its readers which led to abusive phone calls and threats to lottery community fund staff, because of a grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. More recently Mail headlines declared terrorism suspects arrested in Manchester were “all asylum-seekers!”

But a leaflet for the January 27 demonstration also recalls the Mail’s past record of campaigning against jewish refugees from Europe, and the support the Tory newspaper gave to fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s, as well as British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

The Holocaust Day demonstration will start at 5.30pm outside the Mail offices in Derry Street, off Kensington High Street.

Charlie Pottins
Jewish Socialists Group

Forced Welsh

Sue Osborne’s uninformed diatribe against the Welsh language was full of bile and contained a glaring contradiction (Letters, January 16). If the Welsh language is being forced down people’s throats (as opposed to the good old English language of course), then why are parents not rebelling rather than queuing up to send their kids to Welsh-medium schools?

For readers not familiar with Wales, it should be made clear that the national curriculum introduced by the Tories (not the assembly, Sue) meant that Welsh - like English and maths - was a compulsory subject to the age of 16. Most young people have no desire to learn either other subject after 14, but I presume Sue wouldn’t advocate dropping those core subjects? Having a few lessons a week in a living community language is just as useful as learning Spanish, German or French (and makes learning those languages far easier).

Sue said: “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.” Ah, so the Welsh language is to blame for boredom with life. Bloody hell, even the most blinkered Victorian colonialist who caned kids for speaking their mother tongue didn’t try and claim that!

She sees this as some nationalist plot, when in fact the entire pressure for Welsh-language education has come from below, from parents insisting on having a bilingual education for their children. She also describes the Welsh language as a minority language (and therefore not worth learning). Is she aware that it is a majority language in many parts of Wales and is returning to many Anglicised areas, such as the north-east and south-east?

There are severe problems with the Welsh education system, not least classes of 30 in my kids’ primary school, but to blame the welcome revival of the Welsh language is simple chauvinism dressed up as anti-nationalism. The way to even out any perceived unfairness is to give everyone the chance to learn and speak Welsh. It’s up to them then if they want to use it.

Many Welsh-medium schools are overcrowded due to their popularity and the unwillingness of Labour-controlled authorities to allocate funding to what they perceive to be hives of nationalist activity. Maybe Sue’s a Labour councillor?

Mike Davies
Wrecsam

Form of racism

As a Welsh socialist republican of 25 years, I am constantly amused by the pretensions of British socialists and communists to speak about Wales. According to Ms Osborne, “The problem of course is not only that the study of Welsh is compulsory, but also that the choices for the individual are denied.”

If she knew her Welsh history, she might remember that in the late 19th century the Welsh language was literally beaten out of children by the use of the ‘Welsh Not’ - not much individual choice there, but that was OK because the British ruling class believed that it was the language that was responsible for our poverty, while ignoring our exploitation under the capitalist system. I really did not know whether to laugh or cry at her assertion that “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”.

The marked absence of kids topping themselves because they are studying through the medium of Welsh is remarkable, but perhaps she might consider the fact that the purpose of all schools is to sort out children according to their class and to restrict the future of working class children to being good workers. Children are forced to learn all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant to their lives - at least Welsh is their own language and was the language of their ancestors.

My wife is English and a French language teacher and has been all in favour of our sons learning Welsh because learning a second language boosts their confidence in learning other languages - like French, which it resembles more than English. Welsh is actually a European language and I have seen my sons attempt to speak more confidently in French on holidays than monolingual, English-speaking children.

I am sorry to say it, but I think Ms Osborne exhibits a disturbingly racist set of assumptions. Perhaps Weekly Worker readers might like to try this simple exercise - substitute her irritation with Welsh as a minority language with another language - thus we could see that Pakistani children learning their own language or Algerian children learning their language would be wrong.

But Ms Osborne’s central argument - that the real reason that children learn Welsh is because their parents see the economic and educational advantages to be gained from learning Welsh is the kind of anecdotal assertion that is best placed in the Daily Mail rather than the Weekly Worker. Where on earth does she live? In Wales? If so, I would bet that she lives in a plush suburb of Cardiff. Get real, Sue! How many adverts for jobs in south Wales require Welsh?

Finally, let me say that I believe that being anti-Welsh is the last form of racism that is regarded as acceptable in Britain. There are plenty of examples in recent years - from David Blunkett, who recently argued (supposedly jokingly) in an anti-racist meeting that Colin Jackson succeeded “despite being Welsh”, through to Jeremy Clark, AA Gill, Anne Robinson and others. To see this kind of Anglocentric, middle class racism rear its ugly head in the letters page of the Weekly Worker is a disappointment, but not a surprise.

I fully recognise the importance of debate and do not suggest that such letters be censored - print such British prejudices as much as you like but I hope you will print this too.

Tim Richards
Chair, Cymru Goch

AWL and Ireland

Jack Conrad’s approach to the national question in Northern Ireland (and perhaps, by implication, the CPGB’s approach to all national questions) strikes me as rather odd.

The Stalinist-influenced left has traditionally talked in terms self-determination ‘for the whole of Ireland’, ignoring the existence of the distinct British-Irish protestant community which stands in the way of uniting the island. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, by contrast, has reassessed the issue in the classical Leninist terms of self-determination for peoples residing in a compact geographical area - and come to the conclusion that a federal, united Ireland would be the best way of balancing and reconciling the rights of the two Irish communities, and thus of ending the sectarian war in the north and uniting the Irish working class.

We want a federal, united Ireland because, given the communal conflict, that is an essential part of the programme of a united Irish labour movement. We do not want it because we see the political unification of this particular land mass as a good thing in and of itself, and a united Irish working class as the only way to achieve it. Part of our reassessment was a recognition that Northern Ireland is not simply ‘British-occupied Ireland’, and that the demand for the immediate withdrawal of the British army (analogous to ‘Troops out of the Gulf’) made less sense than support for the withdrawal of British troops as part of a democratic political settlement. In short, the AWL recognised that ‘Britain out of Ireland’ would be the result of, rather than a precondition for, Irish unity.

Now to the point. Jack Conrad’s brief reference to Northern Ireland in his bizarre article on ‘Matgamna’s platonic republic’ is an unhappy marriage of the Leninist and Stalinist approaches (Weekly Worker January 9). On the one hand, he recognises the existence of the British-Irish community and refers to its right to self-determination in a federal Irish state; on the other hand, this is clearly a subordinate part of the “fight for the withdrawal of British troops”. But since the British-Irish minority community which forms a majority in Northern Ireland wants the British troops to stay, shouting ‘Troops out now’ makes no sense; it is more like saying ‘Britain out of the UK’ than ‘Britain out of Iraq’.

Clearly we have to recognise the unviable nature of the Northern Ireland statelet and the fact that a democratic solution will necessarily end partition; but raising an immediate demand for the withdrawal of British troops confuses the issue by suggesting that the main problem is British imperialism rather than the (yes, imperialist-engendered) division in the Irish people. The approach this implies is both anti-socialist (because it puts the unity of a geographical area before the unity of the working class) and utopian (because without popular, and most fundamentally working class, unity, geographical unity is impossible to achieve without enormous repression).

All this makes me wonder if the CPGB has changed its position to look more like the AWL’s without really understanding the politics behind what we say.

Sacha Ismail
South London

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