Weekly Worker 469 Thursday February 27 2003
Letters
Bureaucratic
Campbell McGregor has a nice patronising put-down for my criticisms of left groups, particularly the International Socialist Group (Weekly Worker February 6) - it is a matter of “personality clashes” (Letters, February 20). He notes that I experienced difficulties with Gerry Healy, Tony Cliff and Sean Matgamna. I would have thought that Campbell would have worried about the personality of anybody who did not have difficulties with these people!
Basically they ran or run organisations which are not democratic, which are sectarian and bureaucratic. That is the problem. Their personalities reflect their power and the ways in which they maintain their power. Whether I have a difficult personality, an unresolved Oedipus complex or some other psychological quirk is beside the point. My main criticism of left groups is surely clear, unequivocal and urgent. They need to become democratic organisations, otherwise they are a blockage on the road.
Will the two million people in London on February 15 join the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party or any other in order to bring about change? I think not. Will the 100,000 who marched in Glasgow join the Scottish Socialist Party? I think there is a better chance because the SSP is more open and democratic. The SP had an opportunity from 1996 to do a Tommy Sheridan with the Socialist Alliance. It chose not to - a sectarian choice. The SWP on February15 chose building its own party before the broader SA - a sectarian choice. The February 15 march was about democracy as well as peace, but where is the democracy and openness in the left groups? The working class is not stupid and smells out any hypocrisy.
Campbell may find my political position “incoherent”, but I think that says more about him than it does about me. As for the ISG, of course their membership know that they are part of the United Secretariat: I did not question that. My point was that they did not know what was going on inside Usec, or the ISG for that matter. Without an internal bulletin, how could they know, except through the official pages of International Viewpoint?
On personality clashes in the Coventry ISG, Campbell may be referring to the incident where a Coventry ISG national committee member and leading sectarian tried to get rid of a fellow ISG comrade in our branch by a neat trick. He himself wrote a letter of complaint about the comrade. He then got the local Militant full-timer to sign the letter and to send it to the ISG as a formal complaint from Militant against the comrade. He then moved the expulsion of the comrade on the basis of the Militant’s complaint. The fact that I blew the NC member’s cover and exposed him as a conniving bastard did cause a few personality clashes, as can be imagined!
Suffice it to say that, from having between 30 and 40 members, the ISG has never had any members in Coventry since.
Dave Spencer
Coventry
Had to expel
Dave Spencer, backed by the evident glee of the editors of Weekly Worker, wants to haul over the details of a faction fight of nearly 20 years ago.
Strange how an argument which has barely, if at all, raised its head in nearly two decades suddenly does so when the CPGB wants to prove the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty launched an “anti-unity offensive” against them. They, on the other hand, are all sweetness and light, wringing their hands at divisions.
I think the CPGB has had splits. So have we. In 1984 we had a split with the former Workers Socialist League - what was left of them after previous splits - around Alan Thornett. Dave writes: “Clive Bradley paints a horror story of what life was like in Workers Fight [slip of the memory there, Dave] 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.”
It isn’t beside the point at all - and my cheeky question was about whether Dave was at a particular event in the summer of 1982 - which, if memory serves, he was not - where the ex-ICL/proto-AWL were treated like an enemy organisation when we were briefly in a small minority. By 1984 and the start of the miners’ strike, the fused organisation had ceased to function. We either faced that fact and declared it over, or jumped into the abyss. If it had been a “bear pit” simply because of political argument, all well and good. But Dave’s attempt to compare it to Kinnock’s Labour Party is perverse. If he really believes Thornett et al wanted to stay in the organisation and not split, he is naive indeed. Given that we had the majority, we had little option but to expel them. It was obvious to anyone but a fool that this was what they wanted, and they were just trying to go as noisily as possible and take some people with them. Dave was one of the people they took, which is a shame.
Ian Donovan, on the same page, complains that the AWL invited Ulster loyalist Billy Hutchison to speak at a summer school, so it’s hypocritical for us to criticise the CPGB for its line on the Muslim Association. This is not like with like. We have indeed debated even organisations like Hizb at-Tahrir in the past. We wouldn’t have a problem with you debating MAB. It’s that first you deny they are fundamentalist, then accept they are but think it doesn’t matter, and advocate popular-frontist attitudes towards them, which disturbs us.
Clive Bradley
AWL
MAB
Gerry Byrne of the AWL is extremely well tutored in her organisation’s school of lies and falsifications - that or the woman is genuinely confused.
Take her claim that, where once the Communist Party “mocked those like Workers Power for their ‘critical support for the Taliban in order to gain a hearing with young muslims’”, we now apparently “use the identical argument in relation to the islamic fundamentalist Muslim Association of Britain” (Letters, February 20). As with so many AWL polemical broadsides against the CPGB, there is only one appropriate response to this: huh?
Two points. One, the Taliban in Afghanistan were responsible for a medievalist terror. No authentic communist - either in Afghanistan or anywhere else - could give them an iota of support. Hence unlike Workers Power et al we did not back them as the lesser evil against US imperialism.
Two, MAB has co-thinkers in the Middle East but operates in Britain. They might dream of imposing a theocracy here. But they have precisely zero chance of doing it. In all likelihood they will be made into an object of persecution and oppression. Therefore, in their real space of operation MAB stands for certain democratic rights which are today increasingly under attack. Also, equally important for us, MAB is opposed to the US-UK wardrive against Iraq.
So what sort of “critical support” has our organisation offered MAB? We worked hard to build the two-million-strong demonstration they co-sponsored. True. But that did not mean refraining from attacking the MAB politically. We did. Eg: “There is no need to debate whether or not MAB in particular and islam in general is reactionary. Like all religions it is. Indeed the form of neo-traditional islam promoted by MAB, and its Muslim Brotherhood progenitors, is alien to the elementary principles of democracy, secularism and equality we adhere to” (Weekly Worker February 6). Our aim is simple - engage with MAB’s mass base and encourage them to learn from their own experience of being part of an ongoing mass anti-war, pro-democracy movement.
On the other hand Gerry Byrne’s AWL is the organisation that gave critical support to reactionary fundamentalists - the mujahedin counterrevolutionaries in their protracted war with the Peoples Democratic Party regime in Afghanistan and their Soviet armed forces backers throughout the 1980s. Why? Not to engage with their mass base. But because the AWL could not distinguish between the PDPA which came to power through a revolution and had a progressive programme - albeit petty bourgeois and full of elitist and technocratic illusions - and the Soviet armed forces.
The CIA saw their chance of inflicting a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union. So did the AWL. In so doing the comrades forgot that the mujahedin war against the Soviet armed forces began as, and was at root, a counterrevolutionary civil war against the PDPA and secularism. Once again the third camp Matgamna group veered towards the first camp.
Those who sided with the mujahedin ought to have the honesty and the consistency to shoulder some responsibility for what happened when they won - the destruction of Kabul, mass rape and the rule of fractious drugs lords - and how this opened the way for the Taliban and medievalist reaction.
Alec Long
London
Polarising
Martin Schreader writes: “Britain is the weak link in the imperialist chain”, since “The US and UK are the only two countries where the sentiments of the people on this war are not reflected in government policy” (Letters, February 13).
I’d like to point out that, although it has received little attention in either the US or UK press, the current Spanish government faces an even bigger backlash from the electorate than does our own Dear Leader, Blair.
Between two and three million people hit the streets in Spain last weekend, the largest overall turnout in the world. As many as one in 15 Spaniards marched. Aznar’s so-called People’s Party has fallen behind the centre-left Socialist Party in the polls, for the first time since coming to office three years ago. A poll in El Pais two weeks ago showed 69% of Spaniards were against even a UN-backed war. In fact, nearly two-thirds of People’s Party’s voters opposed war.
On Monday of this week it was revealed that in 1997 Spain had offered to pay Baghdad in ‘aid’ if it gave oil contracts to the Repsol company of Spain. Aznar’s government was ready to make a ‘donation’ if Repsol was given a concession in the Nasiriya field, despite the fact that the UN had just issued a series of resolutions condemning Iraq’s continued blocking of inspections, according to official documents leaked to the press. It is a huge embarrassment for both him and his party, and demonstrates exactly where his high moral purpose truly lies - a dog-eared photocopy of Blair, Bush and Cheney’s hypocritical cant.
Similar situations can be found across the globe: in Italy, even before 1.5 million turned out in Rome, 73% opposed the war under any circumstances. In Australia this week, 85% opposed the war without a UN mandate, and 54% opposed it under any circumstances. In Denmark, 79% opposed the war without a UN mandate, and 57% opposed it under any circumstances. In the Czech Republic, the figures are 76% and 67% respectively. In Hungary, a massive 82% opposed the war under any circumstances. The numbers are similar in most countries around the world, from the polls I have seen. And following last weekend’s demonstrations, we can expect to see these figures continue to rise.
These ‘leaders’ do not speak for us. But all of this only strengthens Mr Schreader’s argument: we are indeed polarising along class lines, and now is the time for all socialists to begin building a real proletarian movement against war.
Jon Fox
Oxford
One in 20
The February 20 Weekly Worker reports that nearly a million people took part in anti-war protests in Australia over the weekend of February 14-16. It goes on to say this was about one in 50 of the Australian population.
This significantly underestimates the size of the demos. Australia has about 19.5 million people - not 50 million, as the Weekly Worker seems to think! - and thus more than one in 20 of the total population was involved in the protests.
Unfortunately, New Zealand, where I am, lags a long way behind!
Philip Ferguson
Christchurch
Rail tasks
In addition to the good points Derek Goodliffe makes I would like to suggest three additional tasks facing railworkers (‘Putting alliance back on track’ Weekly Worker February 20).
Firstly that the case for railworkers’ control would be greatly strengthened by a pamphlet on the subject written by rail union activists. The Off the rails newsletters always went down well across the rail unions - former Aslef general secretary Lew Adams waved one around in anger at a meeting of Aslef activists in Scotland shortly before he was deposed. The bulletin had started to cause problems for both management and the union bureaucrats An Off the rails brochure on workers’ control would have an already made audience. I could help anyone willing to write it with books, pamphlets, advice and discussion, given I attempted something similar myself while I was working on the rails.
Secondly there has to be pressure put on the leadership to end the members-only website - there is real bureaucratic control here, which goes against the whole spirit of the net. If this can’t be achieved, there should be an unofficial site launched that facilitates networking and debate for all those interested in the industry.
The third and final point is that some of us in the mid-90s at train crew conferences began to argue for the leadership to develop a strategy for the union in terms of goals and time scales, as well as how this plan was going to be achieved. We argued this would be better than continually acting as firefighters in an increasingly fragmented industry. This seems more relevant to me now than ever.
Peter Burton
Ex-RMT activist
Members’ rights
The Weekly Worker has been covering the developments in Bedfordshire SA for some time now. While this is of course welcome, it is not enough just to publish reports and give a platform to those who have been victimised or expelled. The task of communists is to take the specific and generalise it.
For those who had the pleasure of working inside the Socialist Labour Party in its early years, the importance of establishing the best and most democratic practices of the workers’ movement was of paramount importance. The experience of witch-hunts in that organisation should act as a rallying call to all those who want to ensure such denials of basic democratic rights is not allowed to infect the Socialist Alliance. Gerry Healy’s organisation is now (in)famous for its abuse of members’ rights; the SLP have followed a similar trajectory; even the SWP’s handling of its front organisations must be questioned in this respect.
A duty rests with each individual member of the Socialist Alliance to take up the question of the Bedfordshire SA. The alliance needs to be an exemplary advocate of democratic practice; this and only this will give the SA a culture which will allow it to truly represent the interests of the working class.
I therefore call on all branches of the SA to adopt a resolution opposing the victimisation of members of Beds SA in the current witch-hunt and to equally oppose all forms of intimidation and violence as a method of political organisation and to fight for open and honest debate as the best method of tackling differences.
James Frazer
Manchester
Shut down list
When will this continual whining about the Socialist Workers Party stop?
The SWP have kept the left alive, and their Marxist Forums are extremely instructive to young and old alike. The SWP were the catalyst of the successful Stop the War Coalition, and on February 15 we witnessed the fruits of their strategy. Given the chance, using the same expert planning, they will help us see Socialist Alliance councillors elected!
There are certain members of the ‘indie list’ who are doing everything in their power to undermine the building of the SA. They have upset many on the list who have now decided to leave, and the leaders of this band are now attempting to organise an oppositionist website and platform. They should follow the SP sectarians. Failing that, they should be expelled, and the list wound up. They contribute nothing but the seeds of the alliance’s destruction.
Tom Hoxton
email
Human trash
So once again Donovan, rather than deal with the political and, yes, moral consequences of his trivialisation of child abuse, chooses to retreat into a constipated pseudo-intellectualism. Last week it was inferred that I was a Nazi ... this week I’m only “imprisoned by bourgeois reactionary ideology” (Letters, February 20)!
Why do I say the BNP are opportunists on the issues of child abuse? Because the kind of society they wish to create would objectively reinforce social attitudes that encourage such abuse. What other areas of concern that workers have should the left take seriously? That you mock those that seek to engage with their class rather than take your typical middle class ‘socialist’ view and lecture the (to your mind inherently reactionary and thick) workers says a lot about your brand of Marxism.
Where does Donovan mention race? Er, by baldly stating that my views are the same as the BNP? By insinuating that my views are contiguous with those that facilitated the holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda? Will that do, Ian?
I have no ‘romantic’ view of the working class. If Donovan is so sure that his brand of liberal PCism in the place of class-based politics is so right, then I suggest he comes with me and spends but a week on the council estate I lived on for 20 years. There I am sure he will find a warm reception by working class parents to his views. Especially as that estate was used to dump the human trash that abuse children on ... but such concerns are obviously not worthy of our r-r-r-revolutionary paper-seller!
Remember, Ian, it was you in your first article that claimed the middle class abuser Jonathan King was the ‘victim’. Hiding behind your unique linguistic structures won’t hide the appalling nature of your - and, I presume, the CPGB’s - view of children.
Steve Davies
Birmingham
Arrest Mugabe
Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, in Paris to meet president Chirac and attend the Franco-African summit, escaped arrest in Paris, after the French judicial authorities ruled that, as a serving head of state, he has immunity from prosecution.
Simultaneously, human rights campaigners protesting against Mugabe’s bloody regime were hunted by riot police through the streets of Paris, following the French government’s decision to ban demonstrations and order the arrest of protesters. Despite the heavy clampdown, a rolling programme of day-long, hit-and-run anti-Mugabe protests began mid-morning, on February 19, outside the ministry of justice.
The riot police, the CRS, shoved us away from the justice ministry and threatened us with arrest. No arrests were made. The massive media presence made the police wary. At that stage, they apparently decided that mass arrests would be bad for their image.
At midday, the protesters descended on the Palais de Justice, to support the legal application for Mugabe’s arrest on charges of torture. Under French law, anyone who commits, authorises or consents to acts of torture anywhere in the world can be arrested and tried in France. The 100-page arrest warrant application documented evidence of Mugabe’s collusion with torture, including affidavits from Zimbabwean torture victims and reports from Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights (Denmark), which confirmed the widespread, routine use of torture in Zimbabwe.
I was granted a 30-minute meeting with the deputy prosecutor, and was accompanied by the main plaintiff in the case, torture victim Tom Spicer. Mr Ligneul acknowledged that I had presented a serious, substantive case for Mugabe’s arrest. But he said the official French view was that president Mugabe enjoyed immunity as head of state. I told the deputy prosecutor: “If Slobodan Milosevic can be indicted while he was head of state of Yugoslavia, why can’t Robert Mugabe?”
At 3pm, the Paris gay rights group, Act Up, staged a lively, short-lived protest outside the Zimbabwean embassy. When one member threw fake blood at the building, the police arrested nearly everyone - even television cameramen and protesters who were not involved in the paint throwing.
Just over an hour later, outside Mugabe’s hotel, Zimbabwean exiles and refugees unfurled banners calling for his prosecution on torture and murder charges. They were immediately arrested, driven away in a police bus and taken to a nearby police station, where they were locked in the cells. I only escaped arrest because I had been delegated to phone up journalists. Soon after the others had been seized, the police came for me. But I got away. The entire apparatus of the French state seemed to be organised to protect Mugabe and suppress any protest against his murderous regime.
The next day, February 20, as we left Invalides metro station, Alan Wilkinson of the Zimbabwe Association in London and I were seized in a dragnet operation by riot police and undercover secret service agents. They didn’t recognise Tom Spicer until he had walked quite a distance. Officers gave chase but he outran them.
We were searched, had our hidden placards confiscated, and were then bundled into a police van and taken into ‘preventive detention’ at a nearby police station. I was told by the senior arresting officer that the interior minister had ordered the arrest of all protesters. “No demonstrations are permitted,” he told me. “It has been ordered by the interior minister.”
We were held by the police for nearly two hours, until Mugabe left the foreign ministry. On our release, we were trailed by police cars and plainclothes officers. We were hunted like rats through the streets of Paris. The last time I experienced such repressive policing was when I staged a gay rights protest in communist East Berlin in 1973.
We turned Mugabe’s visit to Paris into a PR disaster for him and the French government. Before our protests, Mugabe’s tyranny was not an issue in France. After our actions, it became a big story. We succeeded in highlighting Mugabe’s human rights abuses, but failed to get him arrested. I will keep trying. One day, he will end up on trial, just like Slobodan Milosevic.
Instead of indulging this dictator with weak, ineffectual sanctions, it is time all European Union governments issued arrest warrants and extradition orders. The one sanction Mugabe really fears is prosecution. He is terrified of suffering the same fate as Milosevic. Article 27 of the UN Rome Statute 1998, which created the International Criminal Court, and has been ratified by France, explicitly states there is no immunity for heads of state with respect to crimes against humanity, such as torture.
My endeavours are, I hope, the beginning of a global campaign to enforce international human rights laws and to put on trial all tyrants and torturers. Mugabe is merely the first of many. Next in line are King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Burmese junta, Saddam Hussein, the dictatorship in Belarus and many more. I want to see an international citizen’s movement for the arrest and prosecution of all human rights abusers.
Human rights will only become a universal principle of national and international law when ordinary people demand it and refuse to accept anything less.
Peter Tatchell
London
Asylum-seekers
We, the undersigned, condemn utterly the hysteria about asylum-seekers being whipped up by sections of the media. We are deeply concerned at ministerial statements which have encouraged the hysteria, and Tony Blair’s pledge to re-examine Britain’s obligations to international conventions on asylum.
War is the biggest producer of asylum-seekers. For a government at the forefront of both pursuing armed interventions and arming international conflicts, scrapping this country’s provision of asylum to those fleeing persecution would be absolutely shameful.
Sections of the media have tried to draw a link between asylum-seekers and terrorists. Now politicians and even liberal church leaders are proposing to lock up thousands of innocent, desperate people for ‘security checks’ because of the alleged actions of a tiny handful of individuals. Whole communities now run the risk of being branded as criminals.
The Labour government is legitimising racism in order to divide us. It is an old, and often-repeated, trick used by desperate politicians. Asylum-seekers are not to blame for a welfare state starved of resources, crumbling schools and hospitals, poverty pensions and inadequate housing.
The biggest beneficiaries of the media’s hysteria and the government’s racist policies are the Nazis. Nick Griffin, the British Nationalist Party’s leader, has claimed the home secretary, David Blunkett, as his best recruitment agent. Blunkett’s ever-toughening policies on asylum, far from marginalising the Nazis, have helped them score a fifth council victory.
The biggest victims of the hysteria and the racism are asylum-seekers. Three have been murdered on the streets of this country in the past two years alone. Dozens have been severely beaten, hundreds abused. Now government legislation is set to make asylum-seekers even greater targets for racist abuse.
Blunkett’s claim that multiculturalism in Britain is a “coiled spring” reeks of hypocrisy when his government is creating the conditions for increased racial tension. His warning of vigilante attacks smacks of double standards when New Labour has criminalised asylum-seekers.
We call on the government to honour its obligations to international agreements on refugees and asylum-seekers, stop the racist persecution of asylum-seekers and stand up to the racists and bigots instead of pandering to them.
We applaud the benefits of living in a multiracial and multicultural society and believe we are all beneficiaries of a society to which immigrants have made a major contribution.
Billy Hayes, John McDonnell MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Tony Benn, Christine
Shawcroft
London
Straight face
Er ... did Indira Sethi really type her letter with a straight face (‘Egalitarian’ Weekly Worker February 20)?
“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.” Well, I suppose nothing is too much for the guy who wrote a book per day while he was at university ...
If North Korea is going to survive and then prosper, it needs a political revolution that would clear out the old guard ... and ‘Dear Leader’ has no part to play in that process, unless he could see his way to “cheering up the masses” by stepping down ...
There can be no socialism in one country.
Nick Davey
email
Rather odd
In reading the article ‘Abolish the second chamber’, I held feelings of passionate support for some demands and of horror at others (Weekly Worker February 13).
I agree wholeheartedly with the ideal of abolishing the monarchy and the second chamber. However, I question the practicality. As we have seen, and the article itself makes explicit, the chance of the monarchy and House of Lords peacefully abolishing itself is never going to happen. Even if the CPGB or for that matter the Socialist Alliance achieved a majority in parliament, they could never push through such reform and so the only road left open is to use force.
The demand for an elected judiciary is, I’m afraid, rather odd. Whilst there is a cause for petty crime an elected judiciary will not aid the rule of law - no, rather it will make it worse. Why? Well, are you going to elect a strict judge if you are a criminal? I think not. Furthermore are you going to elect a strict judge if you sometimes break the law: ie, speeding? I think this demand will be openly abused. I do not mean to let things remain as they are: no, reform is necessary, but this demand is going too far!
Just to note some agreement: yes, it is vital to separate church and state. However, I do not feel that the CPGB’s programmatic proposals concerning religion are progressive enough.
Richard Sherratt
email
