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Lila cannot be blamed for not remembering that far back, but she
ought not to remain blissfully ignorant of real, rather than mythical
history. As for producing “decent politicians”, did Lila
have in mind the ex-CP John Reid perhaps, or merely the influence
of the Communist Party’ s ‘Euro’, ‘post-Marxist’
and postmodernist intellects in providing ideas for Kinnock and
Tony Blair, filling the ‘think tank’ Demos, and launching
the journalistic careers of Martin Jacques and David Aaronovitch?
If the Labour Party “has always been about keeping the working
class and trade unions as voting fodder”, as Lila says, what
was the Liberal Party, and what is ex-Labour MP George Galloway’s
Respect about? Labour was founded by the unions, after a long fight
by Marxists such as Engels, and bitter experience had finally persuaded
them the working class movement needed its own party. But the dominant
ideas of the Labour Party, especially after the Fabian servants
of imperialism moved in, were reformist - and imperialist. The imperialism
remains - witness the Blair government’s war policies, links
with business, and continuing build-up of Britain’s WMDs.
But in a changed capitalism, with the cold war replaced by ruthless
global exploitation and wars, where has reformism gone? Whenever
Labour talks of ‘reforms’ these days, it means dismantling
welfare and education services, pushing privatisation and continuing
the Tory attack on union rights. As a consequence, trade unionists
and Labour supporters feel robbed, and face a historical crisis
- which way do they turn?
Lila Patel and others may think Respect has the answer. I’d
prefer we upheld the Socialist Alliance’s red banner, until
the bigger movement for a workers’ party takes it from our
hands. But, whichever way the “droves” are going, the
majority of Labour supporters and particularly the unions remain
with Labour, hoping they can somehow get it back on what they see
as the true socialist path. In my union now there are many workers
as militant and socialist as me or, I dare say, Lila Patel (indeed
I’d sooner rely on some of them in a struggle than on some
of the people I’ve known on the left, and in Respect). They
have no time for New Labour and Tony Blair. But they were reluctant
to support our conference on trade unions and the left because they
are not yet convinced we offered a serious alternative. Workers
in this country always try the old ways fully before turning to
new ideas.
I have frequently argued with people who said they were staying
to fight in the Labour Party, because I couldn’t see much of
their ‘fight’. At least the Labour Representation Committee
reflects an effort to do something, rather than remaining passive,
feeling helpless and leaving Blair and Brown to continue doing as
they please. Should we tell them they are wasting their time - “unlikely
to produce vanguard material”, as Lila says - so their efforts
are of no interest to us? If we are ever to assemble the forces
that can take power for socialism, as opposed to just building yet
another politically impotent but self-satisfied ‘left’
cult, then we must be able to draw together all sections of the
working people and oppressed, not just those considered “vanguard
material” because they respond to this or that campaign. We
must be able to win support wherever the working class is engaged
in a fight.
Impatience, petulance, writing off struggles and whole swathes of
people whom we need just will not do.
Charlie Pottins
email
Bridging the gap
I attended the founding conference of the Labour Representation
Committee (Weekly Worker July 8) and, yes, the majority were white
and pretty aged. But, in saying that, I got more out of that conference
than listening to anything said by Respect. Respect a grassroots
organisation? No! Populist? Yes!
So, according to Lila Patel, the Labour Party only had decent politicians
because of the Communist Party? What about organisations and activists
who have also influenced the LP? I agree that there needs to be
an inclusive socialist and democratic movement which attracts all
people and not just the usual ‘white straight man’, but
is Respect that vehicle? No, I don’t believe it is. Respect
pays lip service to fighting oppression and only makes the demands
on an opportunistic level. Look at the various debates on abortion
and lesbian and gay rights and still tell me that Respect is all
about being progressive.
The left in the LP during the 80s fought for rights of the oppressed
which led to black sections, the Labour Women’s Action Committee
and the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Many of these
gains have been lost (no crèche at the LRC, for instance),
but this is something which the left must fight to put back on the
agenda. At least there is awareness about real involvement from
people from all sections of society, as opposed to some half-hearted,
tokenistic attempt, which organisations like SWP/Respect do all
of the time.
Essentially, what Lila Patel seems to be saying is that socialists
should be putting all of our political energies into supporting
Respect. And that Respect and indeed the Socialist Labour Party
had the capacity to even produce a fighting alternative to the LP.
How politically naive can you be? Organisations like Respect are
moving very quickly away from the labour movement, which is political
suicide.
Yes, LP members are leaving the party, but they are not throwing
themselves at Respect! Respect does not operate in an inclusive
way and is undemocratic. Something the Socialist Workers Party accuses
the Labour Party of being. Oh, the irony! So, if Lindsey German
had been elected, who would she have been accountable to - Respect
or the SWP central committee?
Yes, the LRC has a hell of a lot of work to do, but at least it
is something viable for socialists and trade unionists within the
Labour Party (and also for people outside) to fight for. Incidentally,
I left the LP in 1998 (having been a member for 13 years), as I
was sick of New Labour. I eventually joined the Socialist Alliance
and left that, because I was sick of seeing the SWP hijack an organisation
which had potential. Funnily enough, I have only just recently rejoined
the LP, inspired to do so by the Respect debacle. For me there has
to be something to bridge the gap between New Labour and ultra-leftism,
and maybe the LRC could be just that.
Finally, I assume Lila Patel is referring to the LRC when she congratulates
Respect for “not boring the pants off those who engage in politics”,
but, hey, at least boredom can be changed to something dynamic and
energised, as opposed to pissing in the wind, which is what Respect
supporters are engaging in!
Louise Whittle
London
Mixed bag
I voted for Lindsey German and Ken Livingstone in the mayor’s
election. For all the other positions I voted Green. Why?
- The Greens had somewhat of an anti-war position.
- I thought I could safely vote for the Greens as a protest, but
they had no chance of winning.
-l As an ex-SWP member I felt a residual loyalty to Lindsey and
the politics she is presumably still in favour of. I did not vote
for her as a Respect candidate.
Now I know there are comrades out there who will criticise what
is obviously a mixed bag choice, but I know I wasn’t the only
socialist who made such a decision. This is emphatically not our
fault. Rather the fault lies with the failure of the left to provide
us with an appropriate alternative.
Let us consider the objective situation. Obviously no serious socialist
is going to vote Tory, or new opportunist Liberal Democrat. In my
view, whatever the rights and wrongs of what has been said about
the Labour Party and its organic links with the working class in
the past, no serious socialist could now vote for Blair’s New
Tories. This doesn’t leave much else, especially as, since
the infamous scabbing comments, Ken has ruled himself out of further
consideration.
Yet at the same time the climate has never been as good as it is
now for some years, for the left to make significant headway. By
this I do not just mean winning candidates in local or national
elections, although this would be a good thing. I also mean the
possibility of using elections to increase the profile of the left,
to alert the working class that there is a new organisation on the
block. One that is serious and wants change. One that is above all
principled and honest.
So what do we get? The Respect organisation!
Comrade Mac Uaid says of Respect: “The momentum towards becoming
a functioning party with a mass membership is almost unstoppable”
(Letters Workers Power August 2002). He clearly believes that Respect
has become the organisation of choice for revolutionaries. However,
if I voted the way I did, and more importantly many others on the
left were forced to make such a rag-bag choice, something must not
ring true with the Respect message.
It has all the hallmarks of a rightwing compromise. It has little
or no internal democracy. It throws such a broad net that it includes
many with political and cultural attitudes inimical to the socialist
project: anti-gay, anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-trades union,
social conservatives, etc. It does not seem to be organising inside
the trade union movement. Of course Respect supporters permit no
criticism. Lindsey German recently implied in her article in The
Guardian that anyone who fails to support the organisation must
be in some way anti-muslim.
I have no concern with operating with muslims at all and I have
no problem with cooperating with islamic organisations in a proper
united front. In other words working together, but independently
organised, over a particular issue such as defeating the BNP. Respect,
however, is not this. It is working in the same organisation with
many people who are not socialists in any sense, who obviously have
their own agendas. It is not working with them over a single, clear
issue, but in the complex world of local and national politics.
Muslims are discriminated against in Britain - the stop and search
figures show this - and of course many are radicalised by the Iraq
war, but this does not mean they will agree with a socialist programme
on a whole host of other matters, which is what you have to have
if you are standing in elections. Nor does it mean that they will
continue being radicalised forever. The Iraq situation will end
someday.
Does the SWP seriously believe it is powerful enough to overturn
the hold of centuries of religious belief on its own? Will it start
throwing out those muslims who openly express homophobic views,
or for that matter white middle class politicians who do not agree
with abortion? Or is it more likely to marginalise those socialists
that are in Respect if they raise dissenting voices in order to
keep the show on the road? Finally, when the SWP decides it has
had enough of Respect or George goes on to pastures new, will it
just quietly shelve the organisation, leaving many of us wondering
what happened to another lost opportunity? Remember the Socialist
Alliance anyone?
So, comrade Mac Uaid, here is why a number of us voted in such a
singularly “odd” way. Respect just isn’t it and there
are still no elected candidates despite a good turnout in City and
East and Leicester South. Like a lot of socialists/radicals I didn’t
want to compromise my politics for dubious electoral gain.
The trouble is that the objective situation I believe is still positive.
Much of the working class is disillusioned with New Labour, but
has not moved to the right and the Tories. There is a lot of protest
voting going on, but there is no socialist organisation worthy of
merit, either to vote for or to support.
There is a certain degree of talk going on within some smaller groups
and with some independents about a new workers’ party or similar
formulation, but sooner or later the talking will have to stop and
something will have to be done. The new organisation will have to
be socialist with appropriate constitution/programme but much else
needs to be decided. Inevitably at first such an organisation would
be small, but with open debate and democratic structures it will
hopefully start to pull in new forces. It could act as an attraction
for disillusioned ex-Respect radicals when their hopes begin to
fade.
I welcome an open debate with all who are interested as soon as
possible to assess the requirements for the above project.
John Grimshaw
Camden
Like it is
Peter Riordan writes: “The section of your draft programme
dealing with ‘Our epoch’ is a laughable mixture of the
blindingly obvious and the hopelessly idealistic. How is the working
man meant to decipher all this? Communism must directly relate to
the proletariat’s everyday complaints. If socialism is ever
to be achieved, it needs to be practical and relate to the here
and now” (Letters July 15).
This is but an example of the economistic notion that you can build
a revolutionary workers’ party by confining your programme
to the perceived ‘everyday needs of the workers’, and
that by doing so the workers are going to say: ‘You know, they’re
right! I’m going to join right now’, and when a sufficient
number do, then you make your ‘revolution’. To hell with
theory, what matters is numbers. Classical reformism.
What Peter doesn’t seem to understand is that to make a revolution
you must have a working class that is at the point where it realises
that it has a historical interest in sweeping away a system that
it knows cannot possibly serve its interests, an understanding that
it has nothing to lose and everything to gain by smashing the existing
social order and the state that defends it. And for this to happen
the working class must have a workers’ party to turn to, a
party that they can say had told them so, that had been right all
along.
That’s how a party builds its revolutionary credentials among
the working class: by telling it like it is, no matter how seemingly
irrelevant it may seem at the moment to be. Yes, Peter, the working
class has a memory.
Michael Little
Seattle
Not in Wales
The prospect of Respect mounting what will effectively be an anti-devolutionary
campaign by fighting seats in Scotland is truly astonishing, if
not surprising (‘Change on SSP’, July 15). However, the
Scottish Socialist Party should not lose too much sleep over this
prospect - in Wales in the recent Euro elections Respect polled
a miserable 5,000 votes (0.6%) and there is no reason to believe
that they will perform any better in Scotland!
In Wales - as a result of their utter contempt for the devolution
process and the legitimate demand for a full parliament for Wales
- Respect are completely isolated on the left, neither the Welsh
Greens nor Forward Wales being willing to work with them.
In view of this, I’m sure readers would be interested to learn
that the Wales Green Party and Forward Wales have recently reached
an electoral agreement for the next general election. We will not
be contesting the same constituencies in Wales - but there will
be no such agreement with the Socialist Workers Party front: that
is, Respect.
Leigh Richards
email
Marxist Party
The article by Hillel Ticktin published last week was interesting
(‘A Marxist party without deformations’, July 15).
I find myself in more or less agreement with it. It was also my
view that the revolutionary party should be as democratic as possible,
with membership based on the understanding of the socialist case
and the reality of capitalism, not a mere wish to ‘do something’.
Recruitment for its own sake is a dead letter, and is either exercised
by parties with a strong leadership who for some reason think the
rank and file incapable of coherent theory, or the entire party
is simply reformist to the core. Either way, the need for a mass
revolutionary party - with membership based on acceptance of some
basic socialist theory and objectives, but always maintaining a
concrete link to the organic class struggle - is what we certainly
need for the 21st century.
Reformism, religion and becoming caught up in nationalist struggles
is also a dead issue. The party should retain firm principle but
also remain as flexible as possible in the face of the development
of class sentiment.
Dan Read
email
Predictable
As regards your coverage of Marxism 2004, yep, another predictable
attack on the Socialist Workers Party. Hang on a minute: I thought
it was the Labour government that has just invaded Iraq with the
deaths of 13,000 Iraqis and over 1,000 invaders. No, it must have
been the SWP.
Shaun Tinsley
email
Qaradawi
Contrary to Tina Becker’s claims, I have never called for the
muslim scholar, Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to be banned from Britain
(‘Livingstone pulls the strings’, July 15).
In fact, I said the exact opposite. He should not be banned or prosecuted,
but he should be challenged. In particular, it was a grave mistake
for Ken Livingstone to give Qaradawi a platform at London’s
City Hall and to fete him as an “honoured guest”. Even
worse, Ken has since gone out of his way to falsely claim that Qaradawi
does not condone wife-beating and the execution of lesbians and
gay men. In interviews on Channel Four News and in The Guardian,
Qaradawi has confirmed that he supports domestic violence in certain
circumstances and the burning and stoning to death of gays by islamic
states.
While Ken is right to defend the muslim community against racism
and discrimination, he is wrong to ally himself with reactionary
islamists like Dr al-Qaradawi. Why isn’t Ken building alliances
with leftwing and progressive muslims like Women Against Fundamentalism?
Why aren’t they being hosted at City Hall?
Peter Tatchell
Outrage
EPSR not quite homophobic
Terry Starr of Bristol is not quite right (Weekly Worker July 15).
The Economic and Philosophic Science Review is as hostile to the
underlying politics of gay rights campaigning as it has always been
to all single-issue reformist protesters (feminism, black nationalism,
environmentalism, anti-racism, etc), believing this whole movement
to be the last resting place of anti-communist philosophy, which
hates and fears dictatorship-of-the-proletariat politics, but is
too cowardly to say so.
Dream on if you think that reforms have banished racism, or reduced
violence, or made for happier families, or replaced drugs and booze
for discontented youth, or taught society to really value all people
equally, or stopped the misery of discriminated-against minorities
of all kinds, or improved the environment, or stopped international
imperialist tyranny.
The EPSR believes, along with Marx and Lenin, that this imperialist
world is on a course of total cultural degeneration and breakdown
due to the impossible and ever-increasing contradictions in the
daily global reality of its grotesquely unequal, class-dominated
economic life.
Your silence on the homosexual disruption of a recent Palestinian
protest in London shows you are as cowed by single-issue PC absolutism
as Lindsey German was by Peter Tatchell, fearing a ‘homophobia’
branding, in the Newsnight TV studio arguing about this monstrously
reactionary provocation.
You share all single-issue reformers’ contempt for the revolutionary
aspects of Palestinian ‘terrorism’. But the Gaza developments
show that dictatorship-of-the-proletariat politics is the future,
not your infamous ‘two-state solution’, peddled by the
treacherous Arafat from the revisionism he learned from the CPSU
and CPGB Stalinism which spawned you too.
You should explain to Terry Starr that you keep up this not-quite-accurate
charge of homophobia because you have not a clue how to answer 25
years of polemics with which the EPSR has exposed your anti-communism.
Royston Bull
Manchester
Murky world
Steve Cooke’s review of Fahrenheit 9/11 was, as the review
was headlined, “powerful but flawed” (July 15).
Cooke identifies many of the important parts of the film but neglects
to mention a scene which many other reviewers thought noteworthy.
That is, Bush is addressing a meeting of fat cats, saying: “Some
people call you the elite, I call you my base” - partisan or
what?
However, it is Cooke’s attempt to rope Michael Moore into the
murky world of 9/11 conspiracy theories that is the greatest disservice
to what is probably one of the best people’s films ever made,
and which puts Moore up there with great American writers like Steinbeck
and Updike. Cooke refers to the “disputed claim” that
members of Osama bin Laden’s clan were evacuated from the US
immediately following 9/11.
This claim did not appear disputed to me: it was reported in the
New York Times. In the film, reference was made to bin Laden clan
students suddenly leaving their US college courses, and air traffic
controllers were shown saying that no private air traffic occurred
in that period, except the bin Laden evacuation.
Hugh Tynan
London
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