Weekly Worker 471 Thursday March 13 2003
Letters
Leadership
It is almost unbelievable to hold back the Socialist Alliance at this time, but, as Marcus Ström pointed out in last week’s Weekly Worker, that is what is happening (March 6).
Nationally for the first time in decades a large number of people have publicly expressed themselves as being totally disillusioned with the two major parties (February 15, etc). Elections are coming up, giving the SA an ideal time to make inroads, something the BNP has positioned itself to do (they may well claim to be against the war). Let’s hope there is no hand-wringing from comrades when the former get a respectable vote, as we have had every opportunity in certain areas to build a base, but this has failed because of the lack of leadership by the SA executive, the demoralisation in the ranks and the policy of the largest group within the alliance.
The CPGB comrades are calling for a relaunch of the SA when the conference finally comes about. I’m not so sure, as it will just mean more of the same - it is extremely difficult to build on failure. In any case it is obvious that the Socialist Workers Party central committee have been sniffing around George Galloway and other Labour MPs. If so something may emerge there and this would necessitate disbanding the SA or at the very least letting it metamorphose into any new party/front. Whatever the future holds on this and the Iraqi issue, it is clear to me the conference should have gone ahead - the more so with the war being put on hold until March 17.
The SA has been unable to draw to itself a wide enough section of the left, nor recruit the new forces coming into struggle. The main reason is that we have not been able to focus on a set of policies: we have hopped around, tail-ending this or that issue at the whim of our largest element - unlike in Scotland, where the Scottish Socialist Party has targeted certain issues and taken a lead in opposing or fighting to bring about change. Compare their record to us: they have turned outwards in their own name and campaigned for public support.
Mick Hall
email
SA dropped
The SWP seems to have dropped the Socialist Alliance for more ‘productive’ possibilities in the Stop the War Coalition and its anti-war activities. This is a mistake. The Socialist Alliance should be standing as many candidates, including ‘paper’ candidates, in the May 1 local elections and combining this with the anti-war campaigns. That won’t happen. The Socialist Alliance will stand in very few seats and will almost certainly get a derisory vote.
I think that the name ‘Socialist Alliance’ should be dropped. The word ‘socialist’ has a negative reaction amongst voters. This is for three reasons:
- It is associated with arch-Stalinist Arthur Scargill and his Socialist Labour Party.
- It is associated with ‘old’ Labour and its state capitalist nationalisation.
- It is associated with the bureaucratic socialism of Stalinist Russia.
On the other hand the word ‘worker’ has a positive reaction amongst voters. The sales of the Weekly Worker show that the word attracts new readers. The name ‘Socialist Alliance’ should therefore be changed to the ‘Workers Party’.
At the same time, I do not suggest that the Communist Party of Great Britain changes its name. The word ‘communist’ has a positive reaction amongst advanced, thinking workers and should be kept. The number of visits to the CPGB website from Britain and across the world shows that the word ‘communist’ actually attracts people.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
Wales active
I was pleased to see the write-up from Tina Becker on the anti-war protest which took place outside the Welsh Labour conference on February 28 - but I have to say that in her appraisal Tina does a disservice to both the event itself and the Welsh Socialist Alliance (Weekly Worker March 6).
Firstly her estimate that around 800 turned out to join the protest is a little down on the actual figure - even the local paper estimated that over 1,000 participated. As one of the organisers - I’m joint convenor of the Swansea Stop the War Coalition - I’d estimate the final turnout to be in excess of 1,000 - which, given the appalling weather, was tremendous. This follows an anti-war march on February 1, which saw over 2,000 participate, while a similar number went from Swansea to the massive rally on February 15. There is in every sense a thriving anti-war movement in Swansea.
Frankly I think it would be fair to say that - certainly in Swansea - we are witnessing unprecedented levels of activity from the WSA, which I’m confident will be reflected in our showing in the Welsh assembly elections in May.
I’m always pleased to see regular reports on the WSA in your paper, but just wish on occasions you would take the trouble to speak to some of us in places like Swansea first before you run articles which frankly give a somewhat misleading picture of the WSA.
Leigh Richards
Spokesperson, Swansea WSA
Not retiring
I am writing to you to inform you of my decision to leave the WSA/SA project. I do so with no little sadness but I feel that there is no political future in staying with the organisation.
I feel that, for all the declarations of a ‘new beginning’ at the outset of the project, the WSA has faithfully trod the path of every traditional left group of the last 30 years before it into being a bizarre middle class sect, secretly despising and fearful of the very class it claims to fight for and with. The organisation has no working class base, and very few working class members and seems characterised by pseudo-intellectuals and tired party hacks, robotically harping this week’s ‘line’, and middle class, trendy liberals with as much understanding of working class realities as fish have of quantum physics.
The WSA makes little or no attempt to link up with working class communities within its sphere of operation and seems far happier building links on campus with the pampered children of the rich that it ever does on the estates. I find myself in the position of having non-political friends becoming radicalised in their thinking over the current situation and yet I feel I cannot invite them to a WSA event for sheer embarrassment.
I’m going home ... but I’m not going into retirement.
Danny Bowles
Swansea
Disarmed forces
The shallowness of parliament’s ‘peace party’ is blatant. Labour MPs opposed to a war on the people of Iraq before it happens insist that, once ‘our’ armed forces are in action and ‘risking their lives’ by massacring tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqi people, some strange twist of logic means we should then loyally fall behind Blair! What pathetic and hypocritical nonsense. If it is right to oppose the war now, it is even more right to oppose it once it starts.
A true peace party, if and when it comes to power, would, whatever stage any war was at, order an immediate, unconditional and complete end of armed hostilities. Armed forces would be withdrawn from the Middle East and returned to home territory, so they cannot threaten or intimidate ordinary people ‘in our name’. Those who have been part of the commission of crimes against humanity in Iraq will indeed be ‘sick’ and damaged and we must take every step to cure and rehabilitate them and return them to the healthy mass of humanity as soon as possible.
Andrew Northall
email
Collusion
Why is the left not urging our government to arm the Shias and Kurds? The anti-Saddam forces desperately need military hardware to defend themselves and to bring down the regime. Instead, the left aligns itself with an anti-war movement that merely urges, ‘Don’t attack Iraq’. It is doing nothing to get rid of the butcher of Baghdad.
By offering no alternative strategy for overthrowing Saddam, anti-war campaigners are turning their backs on the Kurds, Shias and other Iraqis who are suffering under Saddam. This do-nothing policy borders on appeasement. It colludes with the Iraqi regime. The Stop the War movement largely ignores Saddam’s murderous human rights abuses. Its leaflets and placards rightly demand ‘Freedom for Palestine’, but not ‘Freedom for the Iraqi people’. This is a shameful betrayal of Iraqis struggling for democracy and human rights.
We have witnessed leftwing appeasement before, when sections of the left initially denounced the war against Hitler as an ‘imperialist war’ and pursued a strategy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. George Orwell denounced these de facto fifth columnists who had once ferociously denounced the Nazis and then, when war broke out, opposed military action against the Third Reich. An allied counterattack was the only option after Hitler invaded neighbouring nations.
But today Saddam is invading no one. Moreover, there is a credible alternative to a US-UK war on Iraq. We could provide military aid to the Iraqi opposition. There are already 70,000 Kurdish troops in the north of the country, and at least 5,000 more Shia fighters in Iran. Both armies need more and better weapons. Today, as Iraqi democrats plead for help, we should arm a popular uprising to depose Saddam.
Peter Tatchell
London
Arrogant fool
Dave Spencer is a very nice man. I thought that in the early 1980s and I think that now. However, he is also a deluded and arrogant fool.
Arrogant, because he repeatedly attempts to refute Clive Bradley’s account of the split in the old Workers Socialist League on the grounds that Clive was a mere rank-and-file member of that organisation, and not a member of the national committee like himself. Therefore, Clive does not have the profound insights into what was going on that he - Dave - has, and we should defer to Dave’s ‘seniority’ in these matters. And, in case you don’t remember, Dave, I was on the WSL national committee alongside you at the time.
Dave was, and is, a fool: When Alan Thornett and his co-thinkers were trying to break up the WSL, Dave and a few friends in Coventry and Birmingham refused to acknowledge that unpleasant reality. I doubt that even Thornett, these days, would deny the truth of what he was up to at that time. Dave also refused to accept that a Marxist group has the right to defend itself from attack (he still seems to deny the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty that right). Dave took the Thornett group’s protestations of ‘loyalty’ at face value long after any reasonable person would have dismissed them out of hand.
An example: a civilian airliner was shot down over North Korea with all passengers killed. The North Korean authorities claimed the plane was on a spying mission. The paper of the fused WSL carried an editorial denouncing the downing of the plane. Alan Thornett, his ally John Lister and others on the WSL national committee launched a heated attack on the editorial as “pro-imperialist”, a “betrayal”, a “typical example” of Sean Matgamna’s “revisionist” politics, etc, etc. In the course of the debate someone happened to ask, who had written the offending editorial? John Lister sheepishly admitted that it was he. But he had been left alone in the office with Sean Matgamna, and fallen under devilish, pro-imperialist influence of the Irish Svengali.
Dave Spencer was willing to go along with this sort of nonsense at the time. And now he has the audacity to denounce the AWL for having defended itself. The truth is that Dave never understood the concept of a revolutionary party. He still does not. His bleating about “sectarianism” are, in fact, hostility to the idea of a party and a coherent programme.
Dave refers to “ballot-rigging”: would he like to give one, single, solitary example of the AWL’s “ballot-rigging”? Or else, would he like to apologise for his slander?
Jim Denham
AWL
Cover for Conrad
Dave Spencer’s extraordinarily self-serving explanation in the Weekly Worker is that Workers Fight/ICL/WSL was all fine and then turned overnight into a sect - the AWL. That’s not how I remember it.
Dave allows that none of the attempts at uniting the left were predatory exercises, that they were entered into sincerely. So how did Matgamna (the evil genius behind the sect-turn) transform genuine unity-seeking revolutionaries into sectarian ‘hand-raisers’? As a materialist, you would expect quantitative indicators before that great qualitative leap into sectdom, and surely these things have a dynamic. How to explain why the AWL is formally more democratic, enshrines more minority rights within its constitution, than it was in 1983-84? That hasn’t happened with any other sect, as far as I know.
The examples he quotes: the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party, which could mobilise thousands in defence of its Young Socialists in the mid-60s, is now small, splintered and barking mad. The International Socialists/SWP is a million miles from the loose, relatively democratic group of 1968: it tolerates no internal dissent. Eighteen years is a long enough time for the sectarian degeneration of the AWL to reveal itself. So how is it, not just formally but in practice, the most democratic group I’ve encountered on the left? And contrary to Jack Conrad’s silly snipes, it is not a Matgamna-Thomas duarchy. It’s perfectly possible to tell them they’re wrong. And ‘anarchist free spirits’ suffer nothing worse than an irritable exchange of emails.
It’s worth taking up Dave’s rather strange version of events, because it has implications for future unity. I am sorry it didn’t work out between the AWL and CPGB. I’m even more sorry about the CPGB’s lurch into popular frontist alliance with islamism: it’s not nice to see comrades race to join up with class enemies. But to put the failure of unity down to this myth of Matgamna sectarianism, without any evidence, is just stupid.
At a time of the greatest ferment since 1968, when the need for unity, much wider than the SA project, is pressing, Dave does a disservice to the whole movement. In allowing himself to be used as a cover for Conrad pettiness, he strikes a blow for dishonesty and disunity.
Gerry Byrne
AWL
Crying out loud
Robert Conquest as a witness of truth? You must be bloody joking (‘Stalin’s system of terror’ Weekly Worker March 6). This man was a paid spy for the British intelligence and later for the US.
One can and must discuss what happened during Stalin’s era, but - for crying out loud - why base articles on liars like Conquest and that old fascist Solzhenitsyn, who during the great patriotic war against Hitler wanted the USSR to surrender!
Lennart Odstrom
Sweden
Workers’ state?
Despite your attack on it, you seem to fall into one variant of ‘Trotskyism’: ie, in respect to your analysis of the Soviet Union. Your views seem to be in accord with Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman, one-time disciples of Trotsky.
You raise a similar issue as they do: can a workers’ state exist without democracy? Your answer is similar to theirs: the Soviet Union under Stalin was not a workers’ state - not even “degenerate”, as Trotsky put it.
Was the Soviet Union a workers’ state under Lenin? Though repression was not as murderous as under Stalin, there certainly was not ‘democracy’ under Lenin. Certainly genuine democracy is the ultimate goal and meaning of socialism. But no one except Stalinist idiots would consider the Soviet Union ‘socialist’ under Stalin. But I believe Marxism is a little more complicated than using ‘democracy’ as a single criterion. Trotsky also oversimplified the issue when he equated nationalised property as a workers’ state.
The real issue of the definition in the 1940s and 1950s was the viability of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. If the USSR was a ‘state capitalist’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivist’ state, it implied a third alternative to both socialism and capitalism. Moreover, an alternative that did not have the contradictions inherent within capitalism, which was possibly worse than capitalism. Thus, with this logic many radicals like Shachtman ended up supporting US imperialism.
Therefore, the term ‘degenerated workers’ state’ accurately described the inherently unstable character of the USSR, which appeared for a long period more stable than capitalism. In biology, there are often similarly sudden mutations. They can be called new species, if one wishes ... but most mutations are unviable. Stalinism was an unviable mutation of socialism. To give it a separate species name implies that Stalinism is still viable.
Earl Gilman
El Nuevo Topo
Go easy
The News of The World to which Ian Donovan likens me is in fact a million miles away from a socialist perspective on the rights of children. It is such tabloids that have sought to sexualise the young, not workers like myself.
Whether most paedophiles are working class is an irrelevance - it is indeed phoney workerism at its worst to say that this should determine our view of such abuse. Ian, most victims of paedophiles are working class too! Most members of the BNP are working class as well - by Ian’s half baked ‘logic’ perhaps we should go easy on them?
Steve Davies
Birmingham
