Weekly Worker 468 Thursday February 20 2003

Letters

AWL sect

Clive Bradley of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (Letters, February 13) completely misses the point of my comments on the 1984 faction fight in the proto-AWL (Weekly Worker February 6). Whether this is deliberate or not on his part is for others to judge. He says he learnt quite a bit from the experience. He does not say what he learnt, but clearly it was not listening to other people’s point of view.

My main point was that Workers Fight (Clive’s proto-AWL) prior to 1984 had a policy that all left groups should be in one organisation. There are no political differences which justify them being in separate groups. To me that is a non-sectarian or even anti-sectarian policy and I agree with it. In pursuit of this policy Workers Fight attempted to unite with several other left groups, which was a principled approach.

In 1984 the leadership of Workers Fight expelled former members of the Workers Socialist League around Alan Thornett. These members were called non-Marxists. A Democratic Centralist Faction was formed, mainly from Workers Fight members who objected to the undemocratic nature of the expulsion. The WF leadership denounced these comrades as non-Marxists as well. Clearly and logically, calling members of your own organisation non-Marxist and expelling comrades contradicts the policy that all left groups should be in the same organisation. It stamps you as sectarian. Only you have sight of the eternal truths and the holy grail of Marx: nobody else has a right to a point of view. Hence, I concluded, a sect was born out of the faction fight - the AWL.

Clive Bradley paints a horror story of what life was like in Workers Fight at the time. He has the nerve to ask if I was there during part of it. I was on the NC from the fusion right through to the expulsion conference. Clive Bradley was not. I do not agree with the picture he paints, but that is beside the point.

The key issue I was trying to stress throughout the article was the absolute need for democracy within socialist organisations. The expulsions were not carried out in a democratic manner and I have never heard any AWL member claim they were. If the same process had been carried out in the Labour Party or in a trade union, the left would have complained - and quite rightly so. That is what I said at the time as a member of the Democratic Centralist Faction.

I hear what Clive is arguing about “bear pits” - I have heard Sean Matgamna argue the same and that working with Alan Thornett and company was impossible and intolerable. I heard Tony Cliff saying the same about Sean Matgamna and Workers Fight in 1971. I heard Neil Kinnock saying the same about Militant in 1987. Perhaps ‘something had to be done’ in all cases, but bureaucratic expulsion is not the answer.

And, by the way, all members of Alan Thornett’s faction were expelled first and then a conference was held afterwards to ratify their expulsion, contrary to Clive’s claim - so much for majorities and minorities. At least Tony Cliff allowed us members of Workers Fight to vote against our own expulsion from the IS/SWP in 1971. And on the two occasions I have been expelled from the Labour Party I was given the right to an appeal and a hearing. No such finesse in the proto-AWL.

What I learned from the 1984 faction fight is that democratic standards must start in your own organisation. What Clive seems to have learned is that use of muscle is alright when you can’t get your own way.

Dave Spencer
Coventry

Not perfect

I was a member of the Coventry branch of the International Socialist Group at the same time as Dave Spencer. I remember when he resigned he had a fairly lengthy discussion with Stuart Richardson of the Birmingham ISG and me.

I am afraid that at the time I thought Dave’s reasons for resigning did not quite add up to a particularly coherent political statement and contained a large element of personality clashes. I realised that Dave had gone through some difficult experiences in the past, clashing with Healy, Cliff and Matgamna, but he seemed to be refighting his battles in relation to events in the ISG, and even in relation to some events in the Coventry Labour Party.

I would not claim that the internal functioning of the ISG is perfect, but it is not as bad as Dave implies. As I remember, the issue Dave raised was not whether there ought to be an internal bulletin, but whether it should be distributed postally rather than through the branches.

From Dave’s article, you might think ISG members were unaware that it was affiliated to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International: just recently we had a special conference to deal with the 2003 world congress of the USFI, discussing motions and documents and electing delegates.

Campbell McGregor
email

Why bother?

Probably like a lot of people on the left I’ve been reading and watching your relationship with the AWL develop and deteriorate, and one question really springs to mind: why on earth are you bothering with these people? They show themselves repeatedly to be (a) liars and (b) politically unserious.

You’ve shown that Matgamna’s and Thomas’s accounts of the Leeds ‘incident’ was nonsense and, to be frank, it was probably an excuse on their part when they realised the chances of them doing a ‘job’ on your group were pretty slim - something the AWL is well schooled in. Despite their talk of being in favour of left unity their history says otherwise: every fusion they have been involved in has resulted in Matgamna taking organisational measures against his fusion partners.

Now it may well be the case that there are rank and file members of that organisation who are serious revolutionaries, and the most sensible thing you could do is to appeal to them directly to simply join the CPGB and stop wasting their time (and yours on the likes of Thomas).

Gerry Smith
email

CPGB franchises

So now I am “typically malevolent” (Letters, February 6).

I’d have to be a mite malevolent to be planning the mass murder of 30 million mentally ill people. Stands to reason. And you’d have to be an imbecile not to recognise a difference in register between bantering about ‘kicking your arse’ and accusations of genocide. To remind you, Rwanda, Belsen and Auschwitz were thrown at me.

So how are we to take this latest pronouncement from Jack Conrad? As a fatwa? Or was the great one speaking ‘ex cathedra’? In other words, is Ian Donovan raving for himself alone, or is he backed by the full might and majesty of the CPGB?

There is an important political point beyond the mind-boggling slanders, which is in danger of getting lost in the mud (and I was someone who opposed the day school being given over to ‘mud-wrestling’ over Leeds). A year ago, it appeared that there was substantial agreement between the CPGB and the AWL: on September 11, islamism and the Afghan war; on two states for Israel/Palestine; on the euro and later on the French presidential election. All live issues on which the AWL/CPGB held similar positions, as against the rest of the left.

We inferred from this (wrongly, as it now turns out) that we shared a similar world view - independent working class politics, the so-called ‘third camp’. We recognised there were differences on trade union work, election tactics and what sort of a paper we wanted. But with a common political stance fruitful collaboration seemed possible. Leaving aside the massive loss of political trust between our organisations, the slanders, abuse and name-calling, what basis is there now for political collaboration?

This is not a demand for sect purity: it is a genuine question of what issues we could unify on. Israel/Palestine? While maintaining the same formal position of two states, you so massively overemphasise your anti-Zionism and the right of return, and so defiantly denounce our Zionist pro-imperialism, as to render you effectively indistinguishable from the rest of the left, especially the SWP, whom you seem on a mission to cultivate.

In relation to the current threatened war and the Muslim Association of Britain, you have made a 180° turn. Whereas in the Afghan war you mocked those like Workers Power for their ‘critical support for the Taliban in order to gain a hearing with young muslims’, you now use the identical argument in relation to the islamic fundamentalist MAB.

For the moment, on the euro you have not changed - except that you argued that constituent SA organisations should be subject to a sort of democratic centralism, which would effectively bar the minority from campaigning against a ‘no’ vote.

Political positions derive from political principles (or should do). Of course it is possible to change position, but you need to account for the change and square it with your principles. Marxism is neither religion nor magic nor prophecy. It is a systematic way of understanding the world and taking sides on the basis of class interest - when one thing changes it has ramifications for all the other positions based on that principle. So if working class independence decrees no support for the Taliban, that has implications for MAB and vice versa.

But the CPGB doesn’t seem to have a coherent body of political thought: it seems to operate on the basis of franchises, where political positions go to the highest bidder, irrespective of overall political coherence.

Which brings me back to my original question. Ian Donovan sees my alleged reactionary bigotry as symptomatic of the AWL’s collapse before reaction. Is that the position of the CPGB overall? What of those who took a principled position of working class independence on the Afghan war, a mere 15 months ago - does it not disturb you a little?

Gerry Byrne
AWL

Paedophilia

Steven Davies and the AWL’s Gerry Byrne try hard to obscure the real issues in our exchange about the left’s attitude to paedophilia, but only show their imprisonment, at various levels, by reactionary bourgeois ideology (Letters, February 13).

Davies, ridiculously, attacks the BNP as “opportunists” for their agitation around this question, and opines: “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.” Again, confronted with this kind of reasoning, one wonders which other concerns of some sections of the working class the left should ‘take seriously’ in order to deprive the BNP of the opportunity to be so “opportunist”? Since comrades Davies (and also comrade Byrne) absurdly believe that any exploration of this logic automatically equates to calling them fully-fledged, goose-stepping Nazis, I won’t labour the point, which is obvious to any person of normal intelligence.

No, the BNP are not “opportunists” at all on this question. After all, their whole purpose in life is to take any sliver of backwardness and bigotry they can find in society, systematically agitate around it and thereby magnify it, and incorporate such agitation into a crusade to smash the entire working class movement and uproot all democratic gains.

It is the likes of comrade Davies who are the opportunists. He talks about the fears of “working class parents” - however, what he does not even begin to ask is whether such fears are grounded in reality, or whether they are the product of working class defeats, and the systematic ‘working over’ of semi-atomised sections of the working class by reactionary tabloid newspapers. Since in objective reality, as opposed to tabloid-fed perception, the incidence of child abduction, rape and murder is no greater today than 30 or 40 years ago, these fears are not grounded in reality. But comrade Davies, our slumming theosophist, is too opportunist to tell the working class this simple truth - he prefers to fish in the same murky waters as the tabloids and the far right.

It is somewhat odd that comrade Davies introduces the issue of the colour of his skin into the discussion. Since neither my article nor my letter made any reference to his or anyone else’s skin colour, I can only conclude that this is some strange obsession of his. He does, however, have a romantic view of the working class, as evident by his statements that those who have a humanistic attitude to paedophiles are “middle class”, even though it is obviously true that there are numerically more working class paedophiles than there are of any other class. The phenomenon spans all classes, and the working class is by far the most numerous class in society. Both paedophiles and anti-paedophile would-be lynchers also span all ethnic groups, so I have no idea why comrade Davies is raving on about my supposed antipathy to workers with white skins.

Well, I suppose I do have an idea - it is the same reason that comrade Byrne complains bitterly about being subjected to ‘vitriol’ by my drawing attention to the barbarism implicit in their shared anti-human attitude to those unfortunate enough to be afflicted with this psychosexual deformation. What they are really complaining about is not that I baldly called them genocidal Nazis. They are literate people and know that I said no such thing. Rather they complain about my assertion that the irrational bloodthirsty form of anti-paedophile hysteria they to a greater or lesser extent subscribe to or tail contains the germ of a new form of barbarism - that could quite conceivably, under very different circumstances from the genocides of the past, lead to equally barbaric results.

When comrade Davies reaffirms his characterisation of anyone convicted of logging onto a paedophile website as “scum”, and affects that in doing so he is defending the “working class” and, I suppose, standing up for the interests of the victims of child abuse as well, he is doing no such thing. He is in fact calling a small but significant section of the working class, deformed by the class barbarism of capitalist society, “scum” and also abusing a considerable section of the victims of child abuse. For it is a matter of record that a great number of paedophiles learned their ‘deviant’ behaviour from those who previously sexually abused them. This is part and parcel of the tragedy of this social phenomenon.

Comrade Byrne’s letter contains its fair share of subjective idiocies - not least her attack on me for fighting politically for our organisation to take a correct and principled stance on unity in action with muslim anti-war protestors and their organisations. Jumping to the defence of the Murdoch press, she dismisses the evident pogromist aims of its naming and shaming ‘suspected paedophiles’, which even in one case led to the home of a paediatrician being targeted by a deluded mob, as a “flight of fancy”. On the other hand, the Muslim Association is guilty by association of “the real thing” in terms of being pogromists.

It is pretty bizarre for the AWL to so denounce anyone - they have never had any scruples about cosying up to the most barbaric forces when their inconsistent, but unmistakably first-campist politics have so dictated. They have demonstrated this in practice by such things as supporting the ‘armed struggle’ of the ultra-islamist Afghani mujahedin against the USSR in the 1980s, or inviting the unrepentant loyalist sectarian killer Billy Hutchinson, leading spokesman for the political wing of the UVF, to speak at their summer school a few years ago. On this basis, it seems to me that the AWL’s main consistency here is in that they just don’t like sticking up for scapegoated minorities.

Indeed, for all her protestations that she does not support ‘vigilantism’, comrade Byrne still can’t bring herself to oppose the reactionary ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns of the tabloid press. She says: “Yes, the consumers of oppressive imagery should be confronted with the implications of their consumption, even publicly exposed. But we should still maintain the distinction between material and ideological” (Solidarity January 23). Unfortunately, the kind of mobs mobilised by such ‘public exposure’ do not make such fine ideological distinctions.

Comrade Byrne thinks nothing of making slanderous accusations that my position amounts to “apologias for child abuse”, but cries foul when equally strong criticisms are made of her own reactionary and somewhat bigoted (in my opinion) views. Well, tough - if she doesn’t like controversy and harsh words, she shouldn’t indulge in such things herself.

Ian Donovan
London

Irrational

I only get the Weekly Worker once in a flood, so only recently got to see the hysterical reaction to what I considered a very measured criticism of some of the downright ridiculous anomalies and injustices of the new Sexual Offences Act (Letters, December 5 2002). No point complaining about those now, however, since an equally rabid response comes to the most obvious and common-sense comments of Ian Donovan.

On the subject of being outraged, let me be outraged at the suggestion that Steve Davies’s or Gerry Byrne’s barmy News of the World analysis of what it calls ‘child abuse’ is somehow the voice of “the working class”. Such repellent backwardness has nothing to do with communist or humanitarian values - it’s just accepting the status quo version of fact, no matter how bizarre.

How is it that English law just happens to be the one that got it right when it comes to defining when one is old enough to consent to sex? How come if you have a teenage girl/boyfriend here you can be tarred as a pervert, a paedophile, a child abuser, and be jailed and have your life destroyed, and yet elsewhere in Europe you have committed no offence and abused no one? Simply because the law in those countries puts the age of consent as lower than here. Or, put another way, how come you can be married to a girl or boy here, but in many states in America you’d be branded as a pervert and an abuser?

How can the meaning of ‘abuse’ simply rest, not on what your relationship consists of, its value and meaning, but just where by the grace of god you happen to be born? What the hell has such diabolical silliness got to do with socialism or humanism, as defined by Steve Davies? Having a teenage partner or friend, or having sex consensually with that partner or friend, does not ipso facto make you an abuser - I hold this to be self-evident. Redefining relationships as ‘abuse’ simply because the law has quite arbitrarily decided that that is so, regardless of the facts, is irrational, I’m afraid.

Incidentally, Steve, a paedophile is an adult attracted to prepubescent children - only the News of the World’s dictionary extends this term to young adults in their mid-teens. None of us defend abuse - of any sort of person, not just teenagers or children: we hate abuse of anyone. The whole success of this witch-hunt has been in branding perfectly caring and loving human beings as ‘abusers’, when all they have done is live on the wrong side of the state’s arbitrary line.

I now cease this correspondence, as I can bang my head against a wall without help from others.

John Hughes
Hull

Morality line

I have been following the debate on the issues initially raised by a letter from John Hughes and then added to by letters from various people and articles by Ian Donovan, and I thought it was time I chimed in.

Both John Hughes and Ian Donovan have raised very valid and important points. In particular I would like to compliment Ian on his first article, ‘Effective consent or moralism’, which is one of the best summaries of the whole issue of balancing the issues of consent and the rights of young people, while protecting them from exploitation, that I have read (Weekly Worker December 19 2002). Unfortunately, John Hughes’s letter didn’t try to put the issue into a Marxist framework and came across as individualist.

No other issue seems to be more explosive in our modern time and it is sad that people don’t spend more time analysing their own prejudices and preconceived notions. It wasn’t so long ago that many so-called Marxists (mainly Stalinist and Maoist) thought that homosexuality was a bourgeois perversion and should be stamped out.

Ian is right when he asserts that what Jonathan King did is not even illegal in some European countries (Weekly Worker February 6). Any age of consent is arbitrary and the fact that it varies worldwide from 18 to 12 shows this. The state is using age-of-consent laws to control young people, and the state and the media are using the issue of paedophilia to whip up hysteria against people so they can deflect it away from the real class enemy.

The reality is that while the state is increasingly frowning on young people having sex and wanting to see the age of consent raised, the age of sexual initiation is dropping worldwide (as pointed out by Judith Levine in her book Harmful to minors: the perils of protecting children from sex).

As Marxists it is simply not good enough for us to bury our heads in the sand on this issue and buy into the establishment’s line that young people can’t consent. What is so special about sex that makes it any different from many other activities that young people are into that we don’t object to? The only arguments that are advanced against it are moral/religious or the feminist argument about ‘power imbalances’. Most of us wouldn’t take the moral argument seriously and, as for the notion of power imbalances, it is so nebulous as to be useless. If we take the argument to its logical conclusion no one would ever be able to have sex with anyone.

I encourage those contributors who wrote against Ian and John to do a bit more reading on the subject and educate themselves more with all the issues involved rather than just toeing the bourgeois morality line. The book I mentioned above by Judith Levine is a good start.

John McLaren
Auckland

SA independents

I get the suspicion that this will only be one in a flurry of letters on ‘Indies meet - two views’, no doubt due to the pithy remarks that precede the reports themselves (Weekly Worker February 13). I will restrict my comments to the aforementioned preamble.

I think first of all that continuing to call comrades not ensconced in a sect ‘independents’ is a misnomer. They are certainly not independents - they have pledged allegiance, if you will, to the SA, first and last, as the beginning and end of their political life. In many ways it is the organised groups that are the independents, having as they do varying degrees of independence from the SA project - the most independent (and programmeless) of all being the SWP.

The ‘independents’ have a programme. A stunted and limited ‘old’ Labourite shadow of what is necessary for the working class, but a programme nonetheless: People before profit. That programme, such as it is, has been rendered completely ineffective and impotent - largely, I would argue, by the programmeless and semi-independent SWP.

Real parties, as the comrade would have it, are built top-down. Maybe. Certainly parties are built by those who are the most resolute and hard working, who are the furthest seeing and have the most coherent vision. Those at the top of the SA have none of these qualities.

Their resoluteness is shown only by their sterling efforts to slow our progress; their vision goes no further than this demo or that ‘united front’. It is so miserly and short-sighted that they train their eyes only to what came behind in the form of ‘old’ Labour.

It is because the SWP has repeatedly and detrimentally enforced its own organisational independence, when it should (as is so often pointed out), undertake its duties and behave responsibly as the majority leadership of the SA, that frankly none of us our going anywhere very fast.

Those of us who would (wrongly) regard ourselves as ‘independents’ (for want of a more accurate but equally snappy title) should indeed form ourselves into a more solid group. I would further that advice by arguing that comrades join with those of us who remain resolutely pro-SA party, pro-paper and pro-socialist programme, in the form of the Democratic and Republican Platform.

Ross Marat
Luton

Hackney SA

In response to the complaint from Hackney Socialist Alliance (Letters, February 13) regarding the wrong address for their website in my article (Weekly Worker February 6) - they should have closed down the old one, because the search engine I used brought that one up, and it is still on show.

Merv Davies
Colchester

Egalitarian

I found most of the comments about North Korea made by Kit Robinson the usual ill informed, tokenistic, shallow and juvenile rant that is commonly found amongst the not-serious leftists in this country (Weekly Worker February 13).

1. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s government and politics are overwhelmingly socialist and working class in orientation. Its philosophy is Marxist, but adapted to suit the particular conditions of North Korea’s development.

The government has always been internationalist in support of all those oppressed by imperialism. In many, many African and Asian countries you will see monuments, streets, etc dedicated to Kim Il Sung, who enjoyed great popularity with all those struggling against imperialism.

2. The people and party members participate in running their country through many committees. The government has kept most of the population sheltered from the outside world through restricting foreign media, etc. But that was to protect them from western influence and corruption.

The culture of the DPRK is based on ancient Confucianism, something that few westerners will understand. There is an inherent conflict between the attitudes and value systems inspired by US imperialism and Confucianism.

3. So far the DPRK is the only socialist country where the succession of the leadership has not brought about a crisis threatening the existing state. The Soviet Union after Stalin, China after Mao all went through this turmoil. In the DPRK, Kim Jong Il was running the nation for years before taking on the role of secretary of the Communist Party.

4. There is no corruption in the DPRK. It is a very egalitarian nation. Everyone is humble, but dignified. All are treated with respect, regardless of social status. It is a united nation. That is what has kept it together in recent times, when great nations like the US would have collapsed in similar circumstances. By the way, Kim Jong Il spends most of his life living in transit camp-style accommodation, whilst visiting factories, army units, etc and cheering up the masses with solidarity and encouragement.

5. The DPRK has many admirers, including important world leaders and various progressive and workers’ parties, around the world. It is just the west that hasn’t bothered with North Korea.

I have been to Delhi and to Pyongyang. The latter had enjoyed a first class underground system for decades. Delhi has only recently acquired one. The DPRK has hospitals, schools and cultural institutions available for all. India has these, but only for the rich, who are the only ones enjoying decent sanitation facilities. India has more resources and a better geography than the DPRK, but squanders it away for the privileged.

India does not give a damn about the poor in its land. During the recent food shortages in the DPRK, rationing was equally applied to all citizens, although some essential workers were given preferences. India has a food mountain which rots whilst its people get malnutrition.

There are quite a few lazy people in India, both rich and poor, but in the DPRK workers continue to increase productivity whilst enjoying an eight-hour day. India has an unbelievable number of parasitic strata. Give me an Indian version of Stalinism rather than the degradation of hundreds of millions of Indians any day!

Indira Sethi
email

Drooling

There will be a million people on the streets on February 15 thanks to the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Workers Party. This will be the largest anti-war demo in London - ever. Sounds like a pretty good programme to me. Why don’t you sectarian nutters stop drooling for a few minutes and help out?

Kevin Murphy
email

Correction

Christophe Aguiton is not a member of the Confédération Générale du Travail, as you state in ‘Lack of ambition?’ (Weekly Worker February 13), but of SUD-PTT (Solidaire Unitaire Démocratique), which is a leftwing split from the Confédération Française Démocratique des Travailleurs.

Ammar Abboud
France

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