Weekly Worker 466 Thursday February 6 2003
Letters
Battleground
As an interested observer of British politics, and the British left in particular, if only because it seems to be more bizarre and sectarian than the left here in Ireland, I found Tina Becker’s article on the unfortunate failure of the Socialist Alliance to impact electorally most educational (Weekly Worker January 30).
The article was riddled with a disparaging and condescending attitude towards local politics, grassroots activity and the simple clientist nature of politics in western society. People, as comrade Becker points out, “do not think much of people who only appear at election times”. Indeed not, nor should they. In Ireland, people are turning from establishment parties in greater and greater numbers and voting for Sinn Féin, the Greens, the Socialist Party and leftwing independents because they see these people every day delivering for them on local issues on the ground. They see these people work for simple, basic things such as footpaths, ramps to stop joyriding and to get them the benefits they’re entitled to and this brings them into radical politics.
While not seeking to portray electoral politics as the avenue to revolution, it is an important battleground and one the SA is failing to impact on. Comrade Becker refers to the Independent Working Class Association, an organisation with which I am unfamiliar, but which spent six months surveying local people to find out what issues concerned them. That is the kind of politics that wins elections at local level, not a half-assed approach to campaigning which sees activists appear for an election and then disappear for years.
By all means, the left everywhere should organise to support firefighters, oppose the war and fight privatisation, but by and large, that’s not why people vote for you. Hard, frustrating, never-ending, exhausting work for them on the ground on a daily basis, dealing with local issues, is what gets you elected.
Justin Moran
Ireland
Elitist
As much as people may agree with socialists in opposing a war with Iraq, I do not see that this will persuade them to elect us as local councillors.
Of course national and international issues must be raised and socialist solutions offered. People are not stupid though - they know what the council does and will elect someone on the basis of what they will do if elected. Would Tina Becker stand for treasurer of her local sports club on a manifesto of ‘No war with Iraq, workers’ control of industry’, etc? I would hope not.
There are plenty of times to raise the big issues like war and the firefighters’ strike, but if this is all we say during a council election then when will problems with local services and schools be addressed? There is surely a sensible median between the two extremes: addressing the local issues raised by residents, whilst also building campaigns (not just repeating slogans) on national and international issues.
To dismiss the priorities of local communities and the achievements of the IWCA smacks of quite staggering arrogance and contempt both for the vast majority of people in this country and for groups of fellow socialists who, for all their apparent faults, are attracting 10 times the support that the SA is.
What I think we are seeing here is an elitist attitude that socialists should already know what is good for everyone else, so there is no point in asking them what they want. If all the CPGB wants to do is lecture people about how much they need to adopt their revolutionary programme, then why bother standing in local elections at all? Failing to engage with people to this degree whilst you are trying to build an opposition hardly inspires confidence in how you would behave if your members ever got any power.
Phil Pope
email
Electoralism
Stuart Craft unfortunately misinterprets my report of what Rob Hoveman said about the IWCA in his reply to the discussion at the Oxford SA annual general meeting as expressing my personal positions or those of Oxford SA (Letters, January 30). It doesn’t. As far as I’m concerned, I am not familiar enough with the IWCA’s work and political line either to agree or to disagree with comrade Hoveman’s argument.
As far as Oxford SA is concerned, several speakers from the floor addressed the need for the SA to do the sort of basic work around working class people on the estates’ immediate experiences and concerns which the IWCA comrades (as reported by Hoveman, by Stuart Craft, and by Dave Craig and Tina Becker in that issue) have committed themselves to. It seems pretty clear that this sort of work is indispensable to any effective electoral work, especially in local elections - just as representing individuals and dealing with small grievances is an absolute condition for being an effective trade unionist.
At the same time, however, it’s equally plainly not enough to be merely an ‘electoral trade unionist’, any more than it’s enough to be just a trade unionist. Sooner or later (more often sooner these days) you come up against the capitalist class’s control of the central state apparatus and the political leverage this gives. To tackle that problem you need a political programme which breaks clearly from the capitalist regime, and a party organisation to fight for it.
Mike Macnair
email
Independents
The group of independent Socialist Alliance members, once upon a time derided by the Taaffeite Socialist Party as “so-called” independents and mere dupes of the Socialist Workers Party, and dismissed in the pages of Socialist Worker as “the national association of non-aligned socialists”, are threatening to organise themselves into a platform! Is it possible that these 57 varieties of “flotsam and jetsam” will actually find more than one thing that they actually all agree on? Or will the project shatter into a plethora of splinter grouplets?
I don’t think we can afford to laugh, comrades. Maybe, just maybe, they will succeed. And if they can organise themselves into a successful platform encapsulating such a diverse range of opinion - with a more transparent and democratic structure than the sects - it could light up the way towards the possibility of the broad party that the nucleus of this faction seems to be promoting.
It has not gone unnoticed that over recent weeks the quality of much of the debate on the indie email discussion list has improved: not great Marxist polemic, but improved. The petty sniping and childish insults have retreated and we have been treated to comrades’ worries over how we go about presenting ourselves in local elections and how we should address the threat of the BNP now they have taken on a ‘responsible’ face and left the streets, leaving the Anti-Nazi League somewhat impotent.
There have also been updates from the indie website, the somewhat grandly entitled Movements for socialism. This started merely as the internet edition of a pamphlet produced by editors who had been appointed at the June 2002 indie conference in London, which was only moderately attended with no members from the sects showing any interest.
The content of the pamphlet was better than I and many others I’ve spoken to had initially expected, and the website has now become another creature. It is worth a visit, but I wish they would point out that they are not a separate organisation with their own ‘oil slick’ international. You could be forgiven for getting that impression! Movements for socialism has a long way to go to catch up the likes of In defence of Marxism and the CPGB site, but even in its infancy it is as good, if not better, than the websites of the other sects.
The indies meet again in Birmingham on February 8, and it will be interesting to see whether or not the SWP and other groups will send along any observers on this occasion - I think they should. These indies (who may be calling themselves Socialist Unity if the project takes off) may not be promoting the same type of party that Jack Conrad envisaged in Towards a Socialist Alliance party, but if they are not all hot air and can actually prove themselves as a new and credible force within the alliance, they will be a group that the Weekly Worker and Socialist Resistance need to talk to before the SA March conference regarding an SA paper and other motions.
Nobody who wants to see here in England and Wales something on the lines of the Scottish Socialist Party can deny that the SWP is what stands in the way. A force must be built that can either push the SWP forward to that goal (unlikely) or build a broad workers’ party without them, for through their incorrect analysis of the current situation, their mishandling of the Socialist Alliance as an electoral ‘plaything’ and their infatuation with the cult of the ‘front’ they are wasting our time - and time is far too precious to waste, comrades!
Nathan Catley
email
Consenting
In his reactionary and indeed grossly slanderous rant against me for supposedly defending child abuse, Steve Davies only succeeds in putting himself on the political territory of the likes of the Murdoch press at best, if not the BNP (Letters, January 30).
Since comrade Davies is no political novice or raw member of the working class, but a political sophisticate with years of experience as some sort of would-be socialist, he does not need the kind of feeble remonstration put forward by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s comrade, Gerry Byrne. From a standpoint of supposedly defending my democratic right to advocate my views on this question, actually, as is the general tendency of her organisation in the face of reaction, she simply runs up the white flag in the face of Davies’ bloodthirsty rant (which she had read before sending off her thoughts to the Weekly Worker).
The fact that Murdoch’s Sun, led by the loathsome Rebekah Wade, has moved from seeking to incite pogroms against ‘suspected paedophiles’ to inciting pogroms against asylum-seekers should tell you something about the linkage between the two forms of reactionary agitation. It knows it is on fertile ground with such agitation, in that on these questions the mainstream workers’ movement has currently little coherent to say independent of the reaction.
Davies, who claims to be a “socialist and human being” and therefore presumably some kind of humanist, finds himself nodding in agreement with this kind of pogromist agitation by his description of those convicted of merely logging onto a paedophile website as “scum”. We are not here talking about particularly vile offences, such as those committed by, for instance, Hindley and Brady, torture and murder, but rather we are talking about thousands of people perhaps ensnared in just one investigation, obviously just the tip of the iceberg in terms of a real social phenomenon with a mass dimension.
Comrade Davies claims to be defending the interests of the “working class” against my “middle class” libertarianism, and exclaims “thank god” that my views will allegedly be opposed by working people “every inch of the way”. There is nothing libertarian about my politics, and as for the “middle class” accusation - it is peculiar, in the least to be so accused by someone who spent years studying theology at a red brick university - something I could never have afforded to do. Still, perhaps this explains the “thank god” - as comrade Steve Hammer noted, this kind of reactionary nonsense reflects at bottom the “reactionary, rightwing, christian response to this social problem” (Letters, January 30).
As for Jonathan King, he is not a paedophile - his actions would have been legal in some European countries, in Japan, in some American states. He was convicted of homosexual activities, not with children, but with youths in their mid-teens. At the time these activities are alleged to have happened, in the early to mid-1970s, King was himself in his mid-20s - somewhat younger than comrade Davies is now. Comrade Davies obviously thinks there are only two categories of people in regard to sexuality and issues of consent: adults and children. This is a Victorian view of sexuality. Teenage youths are not children, and to categorise them as such is the political agenda of the likes of the Moral Majority.
But, regarding genuine paedophilia, which necessarily involves children, not youths, as explained at length in my original article, this is a serious, and age-old, social problem, of a psycho-sexual nature, that merits a humane solution. Comrade Byrne evidently disagrees: she nods in agreement with Davies that my views are “odious”. This merely underlines that what they really reject is my proposal of such a humane solution - they prefer an inhumane solution.
In my article I described paedophilia (the genuine kind) as “a serious matter”, a “threat to public health, and in particular mental health” and paedophiles as “sufferers from a psycho-sexual dysfunction” and bringers of a “damaging social problem” and called for compulsory hospital treatment in cases where a real danger to children is involved. In making these particular characterisations, I was not claiming originality, as comrade Byrne well knows. But since she in no way criticised Davies’ depiction of those suffering from such an affliction, I wonder which other minority she also considers it legitimate to characterise as “scum”? The disabled? Those suffering from other kinds of mental illness? Or who?
No-one really knows the statistical weight of sexual attraction to children by adults among the population as a whole - the difficulties of researching such a subject are obvious - though the ensnaring of thousands by the recent police operations suggests it is a statistically significant minority. Let us make an educated guess, for argument’s sake - perhaps too high, perhaps too low: who knows? Let us project that one percent of the adult population is in some way so afflicted. Given a population of around 55 million in Britain today, and assuming that around three quarters (41 million) can be considered adult, over 400,000 people could well, on the assumption of a mere one percent occurrence, be considered in some way paedophile. A similar rough calculation on a world scale gives possibly over 30 million such people.
This minority, however large it is, can be treated humanely - as I advocate. Or it can be treated inhumanely, as evidently comrade Davies and many others without his level of sophistication would like to see. There is a logic of describing such people as “scum”: as Steve Hammer perceptively noted, it is “the imposition of the death penalty against all offenders”. When you are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, or on an international scale (and we are all internationalists, aren’t we?) possibly many millions, what more can I say? Rwanda anyone, or how about Belsen or Auschwitz?
The greater sexual openness that began in the 1960s has brought to light matters of sexuality that were long deeply suppressed and hidden in judeo-christian-based societies. Among other things, this has also brought into public view the question of the widespread occurrence of child sexual abuse - something that in previous generations went on regardless but remained hidden beneath a veil of hypocrisy. That openness is generally a good thing. Technological progress is also in general a good thing.
But, just as technological progress, combined with political reaction, furnished the Nazis with the means to massacre millions of people of the wrong ‘race’, so this kind of social progress, combined with conditions of resurgent political reaction, can easily lead to a similarly barbaric paradox in the times we live. Those ‘socialists’ who howl with the wolves not only against this afflicted minority, but also against anyone who tries to analyse these phenomena in a rational and humanist manner, are simply laying the basis for a new form of barbarism.
Ian Donovan
London
Never forget
Mark Fischer writes a long report of the AWL-CPGB/WW debate on January 25, which mentions not a single political point from any of the CPGB speeches there, and a weirdly tiny selection of points from AWL speeches (Weekly Worker January 30).
Mark was all attention to the body language of the day. He is highly satisfied with the CPGB’s performance, because it included “howls of laughter”, “derisive laughter” and “cutting heckles” - who needs politics when you have such assets? He discerns that AWL members had prepared speeches in advance, and is vexed by it; thinks he saw us in “embarrassed squirming”, and is gleeful about it.
But, Mark, other things besides embarrassment can make us squirm. What did the CPGB say, politically? They produced a new argument to justify their action, in September last year, of banning Sean Matgamna of the AWL from the platform of a meeting about ‘Marxism and religion’ which they controlled in Leeds, because another speaker, Mike Marqusee, objected to the AWL’s views on Israel.
Previously - for example in John Bridge’s October 2002 statement on the basis of which the Weekly Worker declared that ‘the discussion was closed’ - the CPGB had said that the ban was excusable because Marqusee was a “star draw”. Now the reason was that Marqusee had been invited first. Having been invited first may bring some veto rights in personal matters - a dinner party, say.
At a stretch, you could say it gave Marqusee rights in personal aspects of the meeting. For example, if he had objected that a third speaker, and the introduction of a third point of view, would destroy his prepared speech by restricting his available time, that might be fair enough. He did not. He accepted an alternative third speaker (John Bridge himself). It was a political issue, of a political ban or proscription, and the politics ranks infinitely higher than the decorum of who was invited first.
When, at a Stop The War meeting at University College London in December, George Galloway MP and Lindsay German declared that our comrade Faz Velmi, as a “Zionist” (a supporter of Israel’s right to exist) was “not welcome” on the platform, the rights and wrongs of it did not depend on who had been invited first, Galloway or Velmi. In the event, Galloway and German confined themselves to dark comments and made no actual move to eject Faz Velmi from the platform. The UCL students responded with a much livelier sense of democracy than the CPGB in Leeds.
When, at the Palestine demonstration last May, the Israeli socialist Tirza Waisel faced an attempt to drive her off the platform, and was not defended by the organisers (Palestine Solidarity Campaign), the politics of it did not depend on whether Tirza was a late or early addition to the platform.
On a trade union committee, if some rightwing stalwart wants a leftwinger excluded because, he says, he will not sit alongside a Trotskyist, then the rights and wrongs are not decided by whether or not the rightwinger has been on the committee longer.
The argument that Marqusee was invited first, like the one about him being a “star draw”, indicates that some CPGB members have the same magic earplugs as Mark: they hear none of the political arguments of principle, but perceive only the factional atmospherics. For them to ‘no-platform’ us is OK; for us to protest about the CPGB’s role in the banning (which, as it happens, we did only after ample delay to allow them to reconsider, and then only within restricted email lists) is “a provocation against the CPGB”.
Only a couple of political points from the AWL got through Mark’s earplugs, and in somewhat mangled form. Sean Matgamna argued that the difference between the AWL and the CPGB is, in the last analysis, a difference between the Trotskyist tradition and the Stalinist tradition. Mark huffs: “Absurd”. What of Afghanistan? In October 2001 the Weekly Worker reprinted material that they had circulated in 1982 on Afghanistan, with a full and enthusiastic political identification with the Khalq faction of the Afghan Stalinist party. Mark himself wrote a long introduction, praising the article as excellent proof that Afghanistan’s Stalinist military coup of April 1978 had been “a genuine democratic revolution”, deriding the analyses of others on the left (SWP, Workers Power, us), and making only a brief and unspecific reservation that the article had some of the “flaws of ‘official’ communism”.
In short, in 2001 the Weekly Worker still did not see that they had been wrong in 1979-88 to align themselves with the Russian imperialist butchers against the peoples of Afghanistan. Despite odd mutters about their views having “developed further”, they still don’t. No CPGB member at the school made any substantive answer to Sean’s discussion of this issue in his opening speech on January 25.
Mark himself did say something on the more general question of Stalinism. He thinks what he said not worth reporting; however, I will report it. He said that as far back as the early 1980s his group had rejected the theory of socialism in one country, expressed sympathy with the historic left opposition, rejected Khrushchevite “peaceful coexistence”, etc. How then could they be Stalinists? Answer? By siding consistently with the Stalinist ruling classes against the “economistic” workers - Russia 1991, Poland 1981, Czechoslovakia 1968, Hungary 1956. The Weekly Worker group changed that alignment only some years after European Stalinist rule collapsed, and was no longer there to be sided with. If Mark still thinks that the CPGB/WW was not Stalinist before 1994, it must mean that he is nowhere nearly fully understanding what was wrong in their previous positions and what must be learned from it.
Four pages on in the Weekly Worker from Mark’s report, there is the Weekly Worker’s standard advertising panel for books circulated under its auspices. From October to August, a manual of the CPGB’s pre-1994 ‘tankie’ stance, still figures there, and with a bizarre write-up. The book “charts the rise and demise of the USSR ...” Fair enough. And what is special about its angle on that, as compared to all the many other books on the same question? “Throughout”, the Weekly Worker proudly claims, “there is a stress on the necessity of democracy”!
This is a book which aligns itself solidly with the bureaucratic ruling “communist” parties, and denounces “Trotskyite” support for workers’ revolts as “counterrevolutionary”. The SWP, for example, has its agitation and activity in support of workers in the Stalinist bloc earn it the complaint that it is too attached to “abstract democracy”! There is a weird, convoluted way in which the claim that From October to August “stresses the necessity of democracy” is true. While repeatedly insisting on its solidarity with the ruling ‘communist’ parties, and particularly the “genuine communists” within them, against uppity workers, the book also calls on those “communists” to install democracy (and not only democracy: free from the CPGB’s latter-day insistence that immediate agitation must be limited to a ‘minimum programme’, the book also wants the bureaucrats to carry out economic measures to advance socialism).
Democracy-as-advice-to-despots is, however, something very different from socialist democracy. If the Weekly Worker’s advertising panel-writers cannot yet see the difference, they have a lot to learn. Let’s hope that Mark’s magic earplugs are his own personal property, and not standard issue to CPGB members.
Martin Thomas
AWL
Afghanistan
Jack Conrad, in his article, ‘Afghanistan and Owen MacThomas’, writes: “Having fed the mujahedin counterrevolution, the US inadvertently promoted heroin, fragmentation, the Taliban and al Qa’eda. The US had little interest in post-PDPA Afghanistan” (Weekly Worker December 5). I think “inadvertently” is certainly misplaced.
The US has a concerted policy of chaos and destabilisation worldwide to bolster its economic and military intervention (through mercenaries like al Qa’eda and the British army if possible). Also, the US has a very keen interest in Afghanistan as the location for a pipeline from the Caspian (interest in the Afghans, and more particularly women, is a different matter).
My overwhelming impression, as an outsider, living in France, and a long-time communist sympathiser, is that, though many good points are made in the article, there is too much about settling scores with potential (though possibly confused) allies.
Lenin did this sort of writing very well. But I don’t think we need to imitate him.
Gerald Traynor
email
No score
Mark Fischer is being a little disingenuous in last week’s Weekly Worker. You would not know from his rather haughty comments on “various appraisals as to which group came out on top - ‘a score-draw’, ‘one-nil’ to either side, depending on who is making the evaluation” - that he was the one who initiated the scoring system with his claim of a score-draw and I mockingly responded, “No, one-nil to us: we kicked your arse.”
Similarly - and more importantly - he imputes to the AWL all the heat and venom that has entered the relations between our two groups. As if he, sweet innocent that he is, had no hand in turning up the heat and stirring the pot for all he was worth. And, scandal of scandals, AWL members actually prepared their contributions! The shame of it: they didn’t just open their mouths and utter whatever inchoate garbage had risen to the tops of their brains (as was evident from some of the wilder efforts of the CPGB comrades). And you complain of amateurism! It seems to be a strategy of the CPGB to light the long fuse, stand back with a look of injured innocence when all hell breaks loose - ‘Who me? What did I do?’
I did find the day school educational - despite everything. It confirmed the claim that “the CPGB is nothing more than ‘a variegated collection of individuals’”. For all the talk of partyism, a number of CPGB comrades asserted:
- That the Weekly Worker represents only the views of individuals in signed articles (the overwhelming majority of articles in the paper).
- That the party bears no responsibility for the actions of its members - even PCC members - outside of meetings called by the CPGB or statements issued in its name.
- That free speech only needs defending against threat of physical violence - if bureaucratic means or the weight of a ‘star’ speaker are used, then it’s okay to silence political views you don’t like.
I always thought of myself as on the anarchist wing of the AWL. You make me feel like a born-again Cannonite.
Gerry Byrne
AWL
United front
I was surprised to read your article on the recent CPGB aggregate reporting that John Bridge used the slogan ‘March separately, strike together’ to justify the alliance between the Muslim Association of Britain and the Stop the War Campaign (Weekly Worker January 30).
Bridge is not alone in misrepresenting this slogan (I notice that Alex Callinicos recently used it to justify a call to vote for Chirac in the French presidential elections). Trotsky’s slogan was intended to be a simple summary of the principle of the united front - that revolutionaries unite with reformists (in the labour movement) in action against the capitalist class, but retain and argue for their own politics. John Bridge mutilates this principle to include unity with an organisation which is deeply reactionary and anti-class politics.
The ‘march separately’ portion of the slogan might turn out to be literally true: on the last demonstration a section carrying MAB banners suddenly stopped in the middle of the road and refused to march behind a contingent from the Worker-communist party of Iraq because they didn’t want to be near communists.
It is not a tactical question whether we unite with openly sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic organisations, and it’s an insult to real working class muslim youth to imagine that they would be associated with such organisations either.
Martin Our
Leeds
‘Fascist’ Turkey
In an article entitled ‘The new right in Europe and the spectre of fascism’ published last year, it is asserted that “the guerrillaist left” in Turkey believe Turkey has been fascist since the foundation of the republic in 1923 (Weekly Worker June 6 2002).
We do not wish to interfere with a deeply-held Weekly Worker prejudice, but the DHKP-C (Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front) - presumably one of the “guerrillaist” groups you refer to - does not consider that Turkey became fascist in 1923. Neo-colonial fascism only became unequivocally Turkey’s form of government as a result of the 1980 military coup.
The Kurdish nationalist movement has sometimes called the DHKP-C and others “Kemalist” for not saying Turkey’s government has been fascist since 1923.
DHKC
London
