Weekly Worker 467 Thursday February 13 2003
Letters
Select few
Martin Thomas - junior partner in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s duumvirate - continues to peddle threadbare lies (Letters, February 6). Obviously a ruling dogma has been cobbled together and it is the duty of every loyal disciple to join the anti-unity offensive.
Comrade Thomas is very proud of the fact that only selected AWLers were allowed to speak at our joint school on January 25. Presumably that is why Gerry Byrne - in what is unfortunately a typically malevolent letter - triumphantly claims that her AWL comrades “kicked your arse” (February 6). Well perhaps the Matgamna group did manage to cohere its upper ranks. Perhaps not. However, the only worthwhile approach starts by asking who advanced and who damaged unity, and who persuaded and who alienated the other side and the ‘neutrals’? Begin here - with the common cause - and comrades Thomas and Byrne would arrive at a different assessment.
A few other points. Comrade Thomas repeats his charge that the CPGB “controlled” the September 20 2002 debate on ‘Marxism and religion’, organised by All Hallows church in Leeds. As the Weekly Worker reader knows, this is untrue. Indeed the meeting was chaired - ie, “controlled” - by Jane Astrid Devane, a member of the AWL. Readers of Solidarity are, of course, denied my point of view on this incident. Being inconsistent democrats - and hypocrites to boot - its editors turned down my submission.
But comrade Thomas’s main contention seems to be that organisers of meetings and invited speakers possess no rights. Specifically, having agreed a two-way exchange back in January 2002, neither Mike Marqusee nor Ken Leech had any right to object when some six months later Ray Gaston - the All Hallows vicar - proposed to expand the panel by including Sean Matgamna. Presumably comrade Thomas believes that his master should be accorded special privileges - no doubt as he is in the AWL.
But the invitation was conditional. It was extended with the proviso that none of the others objected. And, frankly, to describe an objection - which, whatever his motives, came from Mike Marqusee - as an example of “no-platforming” belittles the term and smacks of egocentric sectarianism. Anyway, as I have said before, perhaps Ray Gaston should have simply told comrade Marqusee that his objection to Matgamna - “fed up with being branded an anti-semite” by the AWL - was overly sensitive. He could have withdrawn Marqusee’s invitation. But that was for him to decide having spoken to the comrade and knowing as he does the All Hallows congregation, the Leeds left, etc.
Interestingly though Ken Leech - a well known Anglican theologian and supporter of many leftwing causes - did raise objections too. Having experienced a previous ‘debate’ where - as is their habit - a devotee of the Matgamna group simply read out a prepared statement, Leech asked for an assurance that this would not reoccur. Should he be denied that right? Not in my opinion. Did comrade Matgamna frothily denounce him? No. He knew his invitation was conditional and wrote a polite note promising no repetition.
I must pose another question. Does comrade Thomas seriously expect us to believe that no one in the AWL read the oft repeated advert in the Weekly Worker where Jack Conrad was billed as “replacing Sean Matgamna”? If they were so aggrieved, why did the AWL office not contact us? As explained elsewhere, I was under the impression that comrade Matgamna had, once again, simply dropped out and left the organisers in the lurch. On the other hand Leeds AWL staged what they called a “boycott” of the All Hallows debate. Did they not inform anyone higher up in the AWL chain of command? We ought to be given the facts.
Another point. The January 25 joint school was - the AWL unilaterally announced - going to feature a speaker from the Revolutionary Democratic Group. We objected. Did we not have that right? Did comrade Thomas connive with a “no-platforming” by bowing to our wishes? Such hyperbole must be dismissed and treated with contempt.
Finally, comrade Thomas rattles out - for the nth time - his master’s lie that in the 1980s we sided “consistently” with the “Stalinist ruling classes”. Yet, as he knows perfectly well, we called for a “political revolution”. By that we meant a revolution which “forcibly transforms the bureaucracy from the master of society into its servant” by introducing a far-reaching socialist democracy (J Conrad From October to August London 1992, p92).
During that same period, of course, the Matgamna group backed their “kind of people” in Afghanistan ... the CIA-financed mujahedin counterrevolution. This is a worrying but consistent method which had them talking favourably about a Nato assault on Serbia, still leads them to put an equals sign between the IRA and the UDA in Northern Ireland and being a “little bit Zionist” sees them insisting that exiled Palestinians have no right of return.
Jack Conrad
London
Gallows
I have followed the discussions between the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Communist Party of Great Britain with a mixture of amusement and sadness. You may have heard the old saying that five socialists locked in a room together will form four parties and an entrist faction. I wish I could call it a slander, but it undoubtedly reflects an important truth about our movement.
Of course, it was always thus: why focus on this dispute in particular, when fragmentation has been such a common feature of our history? My particular feelings arise from my own background. Though politically active in my teens, I am a little ashamed to say that my commitment to a just society later found expression in merely delivering a few Labour leaflets and voting at election time. Even this small effort died when Blair dumped clause four.
It has taken the threat of a cynical war to awaken me from this complacency and disaffection. Aware that merely supporting an anti-war movement without also committing myself to political action aimed at opposing the causes of war would be an empty gesture, I decided it was time to rejoin a socialist organisation.
Unlike some, I suspect that there are still many sincere and conscious socialists within the Labour Party. To dismiss them, along with the leadership of the party, is to underestimate the enormous historical importance of the Labour Party, and the depth and solidity of its links with the working class. However, I could not subscribe to the party’s programme or canvas support for it.
On the other hand, I worried about joining one of the many other parties on the left, simply because they didn’t always manage to achieve quite the same passion in opposing capitalism as they did in denouncing each other. Complex and difficult areas of specific policy, about which any two sincere socialists working from the same basic principles might nevertheless honestly disagree, were presented as fundamental divisions. Comrade A would argue not merely that comrade B was wrong in his approach to, say, the problems faced by Israelis and Palestinians, but that comrade B’s approach demonstrated that he was pro-imperialist, or Stalinist, or anti-semitic.
What must surely be painfully obvious to many of us is that the issues dividing our movement are so complicated that many working people with an instinctive understanding of the nature of our society and its injustices would have to undertake a considerable study of both history and political theory before they could even understand the issue dividing one party from another, let alone decide their own view. (I do not mean to patronise here: my own head is sometimes left spinning when I read the various accounts of factional dispute.) They are therefore faced with a serious obstacle to overcome before they can even begin to contribute to worthwhile political action, even if they can overcome the feeling that the multiplicity of small, socialist parties reduces them all to irrelevance.
This does not mean that I think either theory or history unimportant, nor that I think comrades should not discuss the application of socialist principles to the solving of particular problems for humanity. However, I do think that these debates should take place within a single organisation which recognises the common ground on which these discussions are based. Such an organisation would provide a clear alternative to Labour - both to disaffected comrades still within that party, and to the most politically conscious working people outside it.
I do not believe that such an organisation would be without principle. Indeed, I think it a higher application of principle and discipline to recognise the fraternity of those with whom we disagree over policy but whom we recognise as comrades in the overthrow of the foundation of our society of the private ownership of the means of production and the interests of a small, manipulative and oppressive ruling class. When socialists talk, they take much common ground for granted, and focus on what divides them. This is natural: a continual restatement of the ‘socialist ABC’ would be sterile. However, we should not allow this to lead us to forget that the ‘socialist ABC’ underlying both sides of the argument is, in itself, the basis of our whole movement. It matters more to defend our basic principles against those trying to fool working people into war or racism than it does to demonstrate the purest revolutionary credentials of any particular faction.
I believe the Socialist Alliance represents a recognition of that basic common principle. I was extremely sorry that the Socialist Party left the alliance and that many other parties, notably the Socialist Labour Party, never joined. This is particularly so, as much suspicion of the alliance seems to stem from a dislike of the role played within it by the Socialist Workers Party rather than any really fundamental difference in politics. I would appeal to comrades outside the alliance to support it once again.
I would also applaud the continued membership and support of the alliance by the AWL and CPGB. I have been impressed by the willingness of both organisations to grant space to each other and to other comrades outside their parties to express their views within their publications. I also note that both organisations have acknowledged that much of the debate between them has been constructive, and that there has been a certain convergence of their policies as a result. Here is real political principle in action.
It is for this reason that the increasingly acrimonious debate between the parties is so depressing. I confess, some of its wilder flights have raised a laugh: but it’s gallows humour. We are fiddling while Rome, or rather the world, burns.
There seem to be two areas of dispute: one is policy, and the other a bizarrely drawn out row about the withdrawal of an invitation to comrade Matgamna of the AWL to speak to a meeting on ‘Marxism and religion’ in Leeds in September of last year.
The policy disputes are too complex to go into at the tail end of a letter, but I would say two things about them. Firstly, I do not believe that, when examined free from some of the invective and fanciful extrapolations into suspected motives, they are so fundamental as to undermine either party’s status as a socialist organisation and therefore deserving of fraternal respect and cooperation. Secondly, I strongly suspect that they would not have become as prominent or heated had the parties not slipped down the slope of allowing a foolish confusion about a speaking engagement to turn into a major dispute.
Manny Neira
email
Fellating
Dave Spencer’s account of the 1984 faction fight and split in the forerunner of the AWL is misleading (Weekly Worker February 6).
He claims that the majority derided its opponents as “non-Marxists”, thereby foreclosing on democratic debate, and complains of the question being put, “why people are still in the organisation when they know they are going to lose the battle. It was as though the process was an arm-wrestling contest, not a democratic debate or discussion from which comrades would learn, no matter what the outcome.” From things like these, he says, “a sect was born”.
The term ‘non-Marxist’ may have been used to describe people’s political positions, as it is in the pages of this newspaper to describe the politics of the AWL, for instance (it or something synonymous). But the complaint was and is a bit rich. It was the Thornett minority who claimed that the politics of the proto-AWL were so revisionist, pro-imperialist, etc that nobody in the international Trotskyist movement would “touch us with a bargepole”. We were accused not simply of being ‘non-Marxist’, but of practically fellating Satan. And Dave’s image of a debate “from which comrades could learn” is surreal.
Actually, I did learn quite a bit. But the organisation was unbearable at that time - a bear pit, in which not a day went by without the Thornett group proclaiming some new ‘political’ or organisational scandal. It had begun to be like that since the South Atlantic war in 1982. At the start almost all of us opposed both sides - Thatcher and Galtieri. After a few weeks the ‘Thornett group’ demanded we change to a pro-Argentina position. I remember a summer school in 1982 when we - the later-to-be AWL - found ourselves for a while a small minority. Perhaps Dave wasn’t there. We were mobbed.
By the time the miners’ strike began, almost all the ‘Thornett group’ had decamped, in successive small splits. The embittered ‘Thornett’ rump was in a state of ‘cold split’, scarcely cooperating in the day-to-day work of the organisation. It demanded a new special conference, the fifth in little more than a year, to discuss the “internal situation”. The majority decided to call it a day, accept that the ICL-WSL fusion had failed, and declare a split. Since we were the majority, the only way to do so was to expel the Thornett group. We didn’t expel people for their politics.
No-one was expelled for sharing Thornett’s politics, or being sympathetic to his faction. The question was justifiably put to them, though - and I think this is what Dave is referring to - what they intended to do, given what they had to say about the group’s majority (ranging from its appalling pro-imperialist politics to the fact that most of its members were ‘acolytes and hand raisers’). Unsurprisingly, most of them left when their faction leaders were expelled.
It was a terrible shame that the 1981 fusion broke down. But the notion that it did so because of the sect-mentality of what is now the AWL is perverse. The irrational (indeed ‘non-Marxist’) denunciation and so on was all from the other side. Much of it was public, incidentally, since the minorities had pretty free access to the paper.
Since then we have had plenty of debates, including sharp disagreements, without the insane factional heat of 1984. We have also, for example, openly and publicly changed our positions on some central questions. That experience may have made us cautious about rushing into fusions. But it hasn’t diminished our commitment to unity on the left.
Clive Bradley
AWL
Workmates
I am writing to your newspaper to say how impressed I am by your open and honest debating style. I have been involved in the anti-war movement and agree with your views on the UN. I am wondering, however, why there is so much written in your paper about other left groups, as I don’t see the point.
In the factory where I work and where I am a senior shop steward no one cares what the Socialist Party or the SWP or the AWL says about things, as they don’t read their newspaper. So wouldn’t it be much better if you just put things in your paper that concerned my workmates? If you did I would like to sell them in my factory, but at present would I be able to shift any?
Bobby Blazer
email
Paedophilia
Ian Donovan’s letter shows so clearly why the satirical version of him doesn’t do him justice by half (Weekly Worker February 6).
Rather than deal with the points I made in my original letter he arrogantly sees fit to smear those who are against child abuse as in the territory of the BNP. Later he even insinuates a continuity between my views and the holocaust. Perhaps if the left took working class parents’ concerns seriously then the ground wouldn’t be clear for opportunists like the BNP to use the issue. This from someone who has previously boasted of the need post -revolution to ‘subdue’ what he sees as ‘reactionary’ estates in Birmingham. A pattern emerges …
Where in my letter do I advocate “pogroms” against paedophiles? As usual the last refuge of the middle classes is to bring race into it. By stating my opposition to Donovan’s shocking view on the abuse of children it is insinuated that I’m a racist. I’m white! I’m working class! I’m against paedophilia! Therefore, by Donovan’s logic I must be a racist. If all else fails play the race card.
Donovan again shows his ignorance and insensitivity by taking umbrage at my use of the word ‘scum’ to describe those who log on to paedophile sites, thereby fuelling the demand for the abuse of children. It’s a worrying reflection on Donovan’s view of paedophilia that he trivialises this as “not particularly vile”. If creating the demand for the abuse of children for websites is not vile than I really don’t know what is!
Steve Davies
Birmingham
Smeared
This issue of paedophilia has raised a lot of controversy on the left, including a vitriolic attack on me from Ian Donovan in the Weekly Worker. In this I am accused of collapsing before reaction, and concurring in pogroms. This from a man who has filled pages in defence of alliances with explicitly, self-proclaimedly reactionary forces such as the Muslim Association of Britain, whose allies are responsible for not rhetorical flight-of-fancy ‘pogroms’, but the real thing - who would not treat me ‘humanely’ (as an uppity woman, sexual deviant, militant atheist, godless communist, etc) if they achieved their aim of an islamist state.
Comrades who bemoan the fact that relations between the AWL and CPGB have soured might like to reflect on the fact that what I did to provoke this attack was “feebly” defend the right of the Weekly Worker and Ian to publish views which I strongly disagree with. The words ‘staggering’ and hypocrisy’ suggest themselves.
Blimey! It’s hard to know where to start. For defending the right of the Weekly Worker to publish reactionary (in my view) apologias for child abuse, I am smeared by association as a fascist, would-be exterminator of mentally disabled people. It’s tedious to point out that nowhere have I advocated vigilantism, that I explicitly condemn tabloid hysteria and hypocrisy and vigilantism.
I have tried to draw out the class issues involved in the sexual use of children, and pointed out that since authoritarianism is built into class society, it can never go all the way to protecting children by creating a sense of their autonomy and self-worth because that undermines the very basis of class rule. That makes me a funny kind of Nazi.
Gerry Byrne
AWL
Hang ’em all?
I agree with Ian Donovan that paedophilia is a psychosexual problem that needs to be treated in a humane way. It is more often than not a result of the cycle of abuse, where the perpetrator was themselves abused as a child. It is the extreme end of a continuum, which includes verbal, emotional and physical abuse: the abuse of power in a relationship.
One question that might be asked of those who disagree with Ian is what they would do if a case of abuse arose in their organisation or workplace. The case of Gerry Healy is an obvious one. For decades leading comrades in the Workers Revolutionary Party must have known of his sexual abuse. They must have suffered from his bullying verbal abuse. But his supporters defended him on the grounds that personal behaviour has nothing to do with politics.
To me that position is indefensible: of course the personal is political and the political is personal. I learned that from feminists, who argued in the 1970s that in spite of all the rhetoric, sexism was endemic in the left groups they belonged to. It took the women in the WRP until 1985 to confront Gerry Healy.
Another case I know of is a comrade who was convicted in the bourgeois courts of child sexual abuse. He was put on probation on condition that he attended psychotherapy. He did this and embarked on a lot of his own personal study. His view of the world was transformed and he volunteered to speak to groups on the issue of paedophilia.
This was not good enough for his left group, however. Naturally they expelled him since the personal is political. But, not content with that, the leadership condoned the actions of some members who managed to get him sacked from his workplace, even though his work did not bring him into contact with children. When other comrades complained that this was unjust and inhumane, the leadership banned all discussion and called those comrades paedophiles, including several comrades who were senior social workers and dealt with child abuse every day of the week. No doubt their jobs would be in jeopardy too if the leadership had their way.
To me the leadership of the group felt that the bourgeois courts had been too liberal and too lenient. If a person has no right to work, he has no right to eat, he has no right to live: that is logical. Why not the slogan ‘Hang all paedophiles’? That would be very popular at the moment. But it has nothing to do with any Marxism or socialism I recognise.
Ray Turner
email
SA website
You make a few points about the SA website, most of which are presentational (Weekly Worker February 6). The site is useable, and latest material is available from the front page. Yes, plenty more could be done, lots of which wouldn’t actually take long. But if it looks like it is on the move and doing things, does it matter if it is “professional”?
It is worth saying, however, that politically it isn’t exactly a hub for its members. Really the point is made when you say that there are no links to local SAs. There used to be during the election campaign (they are actually still there: you have to search). Your own review of the sites explains why not, but doesn’t make the obvious conclusion.
A quick run through the 30 websites you talk of - how many of them are dead, or have not been updated since the election? Ouch! I don’t think this is just lack of the “webmaster” being bothered, I’m afraid.
There is no doubt lots going on in all these places, but how much of it is being even mentioned in SA meetings - if there are any? Let alone something being done by an SA branch - rather than individuals (or constituent organisations). Of my small knowledge of branches of the SA some of the few you mention as good also happen to be the active branches I know of.
We know the SA brought socialist activists of all sorts of backgrounds to organise together locally when the general election was on. Some have managed to keep on going, some not. Why?
Towns that work (and I wouldn’t really hold York as one, though it isn’t too bad) need only a few people committed to the SA because I actually believe it is more complicated than just the SWP (centre’s) electoral-only orientation to the SA, although that is certainly a factor.
A fair few of their members agree (though how many I wouldn’t hazard a guess). More generally people don’t know, or have not decided - in a meeting - what the SA is for yet!
Kester Edmonds
email
Wonderland
As they gathered and congratulated each other on ‘all’ being winners, a most curious character waddled into view. It stood in a clearing and just waddled, neither progressing forwards nor indeed going backwards, but still seemed to give the impression that it was heading somewhere!
“What is it?” cried Alice. “I’m not sure,” replied the Dodo. As they studied the waddling entity in the clearing, a diminutive red gnome with pixie-like ears and reflective pate crawled out from under the stone eaglet it had rested himself upon. “Hello,” said Alice. “Do you know what that creature is?” “Of course I do. I am a sophisticated, wonderful pixie,” said the pixie, “and I know all.” “So what is it pray?” persisted Alice.
The ‘SWP’ took on an ‘all-knowing’ and superior air and declared: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it’s a duck!” “Don’t be ludicrous,” squawked Eaglet. “Anyone not taken in by silly waster pixies can see it is a creature ‘of a special kind’ - it is an ‘SA’!” “What is an ‘SA’?” enquired Alice. “Sad Appendage,” answered the Eaglet. “It is a poor imitation of a duck and can be found in ‘front’ of these SWPs wherever they exist!”
Lewis Carols
email
Weak link
I’ve been following the events in Britain around the war as carefully as I can - given the fact that we have our own problems to deal with. Reading all of the recent reports about the situation there, I’m beginning to think that Britain is becoming the weak link in the imperialist chain.
The report that the war could bring mass walkouts among the proletariat attests to that, in my opinion. The US and UK are the only two countries where the sentiments of the people on this war are not reflected in government policy. I tend to think that this is going to lead to a serious conflict - with the proletariat and sections of the petty bourgeoisie on one side, and the bourgeoisie on the other.
Unlike here in the US, where the position of the proletarian is fast eroding (the proletariat, under the existing regime, is not only losing the battle for democracy; it is also losing the battle for survival), the UK appears to be polarising and mobilising along class lines. If there was ever a time for the party to tell the SWP types to piss off, it is now. While I would not recommend abandoning work in the Socialist Alliance, I would recommend that the CPGB step up its independent face and do more activity without the SA albatross around its neck.
I know that such a thing would be hard, but it seems to me - albeit observing from a distance - that the thing to do right now is to begin exerting real pressure and influence on the rank and file of unions like Aslef, RMT, CWU and PCS. They are the ones talking about the likelihood of a mass walkout. They should be targeted by articles in the Weekly Worker about the need for a real proletarian movement against war, and for a real proletarian party.
Martin Schreader
Detroit
Parsnips
Congratulations to Ian Donovan for his excellent article ‘Anti-war movement must avoid UN trap’, which as a front page article I presume is endorsed by the editorial board of Weekly Worker and PCC of the CPGB (February 6).
I particularly liked the paragraph: “It is the task of the conscious elements of the anti-war movement, particularly revolutionary socialists and communists, to seek actively by means of propaganda to harden up the anti-war masses, including through exposure of the record and crimes of the United Nations in the service of imperialist interests over decades … We should not be afraid to outspokenly criticise the likes of Tony Benn, who preach above all that this war is immoral because of its tendency to violate ‘international law’, more than because of its predatory, imperialist nature per se.”
And I endorse Ian’s hope that it will be possible for “the working class to advance its own independent interests, and begin to take the offensive against the capitalist social system itself, a system that breeds the barbarism of imperialist war”.
However, as we say around these parts, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips’. I therefore wait to see if the sentiments advanced by comrade Donovan go beyond mere words and instead will become a guide to action for the CPGB’s intervention into the peace movement. Specifically whether the CPGB will finally begin to actively oppose the bourgeois pacifism of the Stop the War Coalition, the platform it provides for pro-UN apologists such as Benn, and its overtures to the class enemy in the form of the Liberal Democrats. All being things the CPGB, like the rest of the so-called ‘revolutionary’ left who tail the opportunism of the SWP, have so far failed to do!
Brian Walters
email
Hackney SA
You have got the wrong address for our website - www.hackneysa.net is the real site.
Hackney Socialist Alliance
London
