Weekly Worker 561 Thursday January 27 2005

Letters

Superexploitation
Comrade Evangelos (Letters, January 20) states that Cameron Richards is wrong to say that British immigration legislation is principally aimed at keeping out the poor and working class (‘Divide and rule’, January 13). How come, asks comrade Evangelos, 15-20 million poor immigrants have come to ‘Fortress Europe’ over the last 10 years in that case? But look at the law, look at who is in prison and who is being deported.

Our rulers want cheap labour, but they do not want to make social provision for it: eg, healthcare, education, housing, social security rights, etc. By making it illegal they achieve this end and much more. Illegal immigrants have no rights, no security, are unable to fully integrate into our society and can easily be deported if their labour is no longer needed. They are available for superexploitation and unable to defend themselves.

Comrade Evangelos appears to be of a nationalist-socialist bent and perhaps thinks that if the police trawled through the sweatshops, cafes, hotels, farms and immigrant areas, most of these people could be rounded up and got rid of. That would leave all the jobs available for British unionised workers - though few would work for such poor pay and conditions.

The only answer the working class has to the ruling class’s divide and rule tactics is our own self-organisation - and unity based on the equality of all workers, irrespective of sex, religion, ethnicity, nationality or age. This means open borders: workers must have the same rights as capital if we are to fight effectively for freedom and against poverty. The struggle against poverty is a global one and requires working class unity against capital on the same global basis.

As for our “bible, The Guardian”, I can see where he is coming from. The left with its weekly and monthly publications has to rely for some of its information on the liberal bourgeoisie and through this filter people’s thinking is doubtless influenced.

However, The Guardian does not advocate open borders, pay rises that ignore the interests of capital, or the extension of working class power through the combination of political and economic struggle on a worldwide scale leading to revolutionary expropriation of capital by the working class. Agreed?
Phil Kent
Haringey

SWP apologist
Peter Manson, replying to Brian Miller, engages in petty distortion when he says that “shortly before [my] resignation” from the CPGB I submitted a document saying that “abortion rights are not under threat right now”, and exclaims: “Even the SWP has stopped claiming that”. Peter notes my vote against the CPGB’s anti-Galloway motion on the ‘worker’s wage’; by omission, I suppose, the innuendo here is that I in some way took an unprincipled position on abortion at the recent Respect conference (Letters, January 20).

In fact (as Peter very well knows) I formally moved the CPGB’s rather strident motion on abortion at that conference, and voted for it, along with the International Socialist Group’s similar, but more diplomatically worded, motion - and indeed the official motion. Unlike the CPGB’s ‘worker’s wage’ motion - a third-period ultimatum posing as a precondition of an electoral alliance with George Galloway that he has to embrace the norms of the Paris Commune/dictatorship of the proletariat - the motions on abortion were on matters of policy in the here and now and had merit in themselves.

The document Peter refers to was dated May 23. My resignation from the CPGB took place in early August. Hardly “shortly before”, is it, Peter? I resigned more than two months later. The actual passage reads as follows: “Abortion rights are not under threat in this country. Not from the bourgeoisie, and certainly not from George Galloway. If abortion rights were under any tangible threat, you can rest assured that both myself and undoubtedly the entire membership of the Socialist Workers Party, to the very last man or woman, would be out on the streets mobilising against such a threat. But there is no such threat for now or for the foreseeable future.”

I would be critical of this only in one sense: it did not foresee the furore that would subsequently erupt over the publication of enhanced and highly vivid images of live foetuses, the product of major technological advances in digital photography, that were used to stir up a certain degree of agitation for restrictions on late abortion.

This criticism, however, really boils down in reality to not being in possession of a crystal ball - the publication of these images could not have been foreseen (and the CPGB’s worst islamophobes no more predicted them than I did). What is being mooted as the upshot of this is some reduction in time limits - together with a proposal to introduce abortion on demand in the early period of pregnancy. My view, if such a bill is actually tabled, is that we should support the reform represented by the latter proposal, while rejecting any further restrictions on time limits. A position that is quite compatible with Respect’s agreed policy of defending the current legislation against reactionary attack. And of course, no such bill has yet been tabled. If it is, my prediction remains as to how the SWP will react.

The point remains that the bourgeoisie in this country is not currently minded to reverse the gains of the 1960s on abortion. Nor does it have any intention to reverse catholic emancipation, to force the wearing of yellow stars for Jews, nor to recriminalise homosexuality. Such matters were never questions of principle for the bourgeoisie in any case, but rather means of ideologically enslaving and dividing the working class, of ensuring its docility and suitability for exploitation. As soon as it becomes clear that maintaining such reactionary norms is likely to inflame struggle and unite opposition more than it divides the working class, they are quietly relegated to the back burner. That in fact is the real nature of the so-called bourgeois ‘anti-racism’ that the CPGB has seized upon to virtually over-theorise racism in this country out of existence - pragmatism and gross hypocrisy.

The British ruling class is, however, in the here and now very much minded to treat the British muslim population as a ‘fifth column’ in the ‘war against terror’. It is so minded because it sees this as a potent means of opening new divisions in the working class. That is why the solidarity of the left and the workers’ movement with muslims against this reaction is an obligation, and why the Respect project is fundamentally correct and progressive. It is the product of a situation that could not have been foreseen in the period prior to the last general election, for instance, when the Socialist Alliance project was at its peak.

The CPGB, incidentally, contributed to the demise of the SA at its 2003 conference by its manoeuvres to keep the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s representative, Martin Thomas, on the SA executive committee. That is one thing I am self-critical about - for all my opposition to the islamophobic trend in the CPGB, I did not appreciate the significance of this event and fight about it at the time. But by its (pyrrhically) victorious struggle to keep this organised, virulently islamophobic tendency in the SA in the name of ‘left unity’, it marked the SA as a formation tolerant of islamophobic bigotry that could not be the instrument that progressive-minded muslims were seeking for their alliance with the left. Thus the CPGB inadvertently helped to doom the SA.

George Galloway’s conservative views on abortion were in the public domain long before 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and his expulsion from the Labour Party. He was not expelled from the Labour Party for his views on abortion, but rather for his courageous call on British troops to refuse to fight, and defence of the right of Iraqi Arabs to resist imperialist invasion.

The CPGB cannot, even now, unconditionally defend their right to so resist, and make a simple public statement that - however critical it may be of particular acts committed or of the political current that carry them out - nevertheless it is unconditionally on their side against our ‘government’ and supports their right to expel the invading imperialist scum by any means necessary. This shows that its fundamental political critique of the SWP and George Galloway is from the right and no amount of huffing and puffing about the so-called ‘opportunism’ of its anti-imperialist critics can obscure that fact.
Ian Donovan
London

Which ‘support’?
Peter Manson takes comrade Miller to task for saying “it is ‘a basic question for a Leninist’ to ‘unconditionally but critically’ support all those resisting a colonial occupation” (Letters, January 20).
The real difficulty arises from the use of the term ‘support’ in relation to non-Marxist anti-imperialist forces (ie, bourgeois nationalists, petty-bourgeois nationalists and clerical nationalists). This is because the term can be interpreted in more than one way: either (a) as meaning ‘political support’ for non-Marxist insurgents in Iraq; or (b) militarily aiding the war of resistance against occupation. It is disingenuous to insinuate that either Miller or Donovan advocate the former - as Manson attempts to do by deliberately exploiting confusion over the above two meanings. The latter interpretation is not only entirely valid for Marxists in the imperialist centres - it is obligatory. As Trotsky famously put it, “The British socialist who fails to support, by all possible means, the armed uprisings of colonial peoples in India, Egypt and Ireland, deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet” (L Trotsky Writings on Britain).

No ambiguity there. Trotsky’s other well known statement about a hypothetical war between ‘democratic’ Britain and ‘fascist’ Brazil, in which he states that he would be “on the side of ‘fascist’ Brazil”, is also at odds with Manson’s comments about discriminating in favour of “secular and democratic forces”. Likewise, comrade Manson, in this war between ‘democratic’ Britain and ‘fascist’ Iraq, I am on the side the side of ‘fascist’ Iraq. Manson’s comments simply echo the hoary old hypocritical baloney of British ‘democratic’ imperialism. We defend Iraq against imperialism because it is an oppressed nation, regardless of the nature of its political leadership.

But let’s be clearer still about terminology: the formulation ‘united front’ greatly overstates the nature of the relations which Marxists may establish with bourgeois nationalist non-Marxist forces in the context of an anti-imperialist war: eg, with the Ba’athists or the Taliban. It is not a question of united fronts, but of “limited, practical agreements” (the formulation used by the early Comintern) with bourgeois colonial military forces opposed to the occupation. The anti-imperialist united front is possible only with petty bourgeois forces of the town and countryside (cf: the Bolshevik alliances with the left Socialist Revolutionaries). The objective of establishing limited practical agreements and the anti-imperialist front is to win the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle away from the non-Marxist insurgents in the same way that the Bolsheviks gradually undermined the leadership of the SR/Menshevik/Cadet bloc in 1917.

The problem is that the CPGB has done very little to establish a workers’ international in the past and consequently it has no forces on the ground in Iraq at this time. It is thus only able to offer its advice from afar. The Iraqis and the Palestinians no longer have a professional army. The insurgents have been forced to fight back through the traditional methods used by colonial petty bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist forces everywhere: guerrilla warfare (the Chinese Revolution and Vietnam being the obvious examples). Suicide bombings of civilian targets are the desperate actions of a desperate people. They are carried out by people who have been driven to the point of despair by the callous brutality of the Anglo-American and Zionist colonial occupiers of their countries. They are the actions of people who lash out blindly at their tormentors.

If a serially physically abused, or raped, woman struck out in anger at her male tormentor (or killed him), would we have the right to ‘condemn’ her for doing so? Yes or no? Some men would say ‘yes’, no doubt. They would say that, wouldn’t they? But many women might beg to differ. Do we, as citizens of the oppressor colonising countries, really have the right to ‘condemn’ people in occupied countries, serially ‘raped’ by ‘our’ armed forces, for similarly lashing out blindly at their tormentors? I think not.
How can we explain such things in a popular, meaningful way to the average British worker? There are difficulties and dangers with making analogies between wartime imperialist Britain and present-day colonial Iraq. However, it is possible to expose the hypocrisy of British warmongers by pointing out the fact that when Britain was threatened with possible invasion by Nazi Germany in 1940, Churchill famously said: “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the landing grounds, we will fight them in the hills. We shall never surrender ...”

Churchill was not talking about non-violent direct action. He was talking about killing, sabotage, bombings, slitting the throats of the Germans at every opportunity. If the invasion had taken place, a guerrilla resistance movement would have been formed to do this on a systematic basis. In wartime the usual peace-time moral imperative, ‘Thou shalt not kill’, turns suddenly into its opposite: ‘Thou shalt kill as many of the enemy as possible’ (and be given a medal for doing so). Western rightist hypocrites try to confuse the issue by disingenuously claiming that we are not at war today and thus the morality of peace-time prevails. That is simply not the case today in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. There is a war going on in these countries.

Anti-imperialist national liberation movements are never very pretty. There is no place for squeamish moralism in the Marxist movement. And we can also point out that there is a simple way to end the suicide bombings: get the foreign troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza, pull down the West Bank wall and dismantle the Israeli settlements. Initiate a programme of reparations and aid. But, of course, there is little chance of this happening while imperialism reigns supreme.

However, there is a political alternative to guerrillaism and suicide bombing. It is the methodology used by the mass Trotskyist movements in Vietnam in the 1940s and Bolivia in the 1950 - concentrating the work of Marxists in the working class districts of the urban centres - building a Marxist party and preparing the ground for a democratic opening (à la February 1917) and an eventual October 1917. When is the CPGB going to take seriously the task of building a workers’ international that could supervise such an undertaking?
J Larkin
email

Learn to think
I can only assume from his silence on the question that Michael Little now accepts that Trotsky was no “defeatist” (Weekly Worker January 13). Sadly Michael persists with the Stalinised ‘Leninism’ on questions of imperialism and war - with disastrous consequences were Iraqi workers to take his advice and support the fundamentalists.

Michael says Trotsky’s Their morals and ours (1938) summarises the right approach. I agree. Trotsky polemicises against those who proceed from abstract moral postulates (of means and ends) rather than the necessities of the class struggle. Yet this is precisely the mistake Michael makes - he detaches the end (defeating imperialism) from the means - working class self-liberation. His ‘anti-imperialism’ is abstract moralism cut off from the only agency that can truly defeat imperialism in Iraq - the Iraqi working class. Michael should learn to read the texts he refers to, and understand the method.
I recommend he read another article from the same period by Trotsky - ‘Learn to think’ (May 22 1938). Trotsky explains how, for the working class, our enemy’s enemy is not necessarily our friend. US and UK imperialism are certainly enemies of the Iraqi workers - but the fundamentalist and neo-Ba’athist ‘resistance’ are not friends of Iraqi workers just because they oppose the occupation. The Trotskyist approach is to advocate the independence of the working class, both in Iraq and in the rest of the world.
Paul Hampton
AWL

Slave holocaust
A small correction. In his article on ‘Harry, the Nazi’, Eddie Ford writes: “Remember the British trade in black slaves - it is estimated that at least a million died in transit during the Atlantic crossing” (‘Mutual admiration’, January 20).
According to historian Lori Robison, upwards of 100 million of the 250 million Africans taken as slaves died in the ‘middle passage’ - the slave-trade routes between North America and Africa. This is certainly one holocaust that you won’t see the bourgeoisie commemorating any time soon.
Martin Schreader
email

Despairing advice
So my old friend, Graham Bash, is offering some despairing advice to socialists: seek out your nearest anti-war Labour MP (‘Anti-war fightback and the Blair-Brown leadership battle’ Weekly Worker January 20). Maybe a bit of travelling for some comrades!

Graham neglects to mention Scotland, where the Scottish Socialist Party will be fielding a full list of anti-war candidates, including me. In England the best result would be a minority Labour government dependent on Liberal support. Then you might get democracy for Westminster, as we have in Scotland. Then you might get the space to create a socialist party in England, as we have in Scotland.

So in England you should vote as left as you can: in Brighton Kemptown for the Greens; in Poplar for George Galloway; and where you don’t have any left alternative hold your nose and vote Liberal - I know they are a pale attempt at an anti-war party, but they could help deliver PR and that is worth getting.
Then even Graham could finally leave Labour and won’t have to offer such despairing advice.
Hugh Kerr
Kilmarnock

Up to scratch
In your article ‘Make charity history’ you mentioned that the Italian-American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were framed on rape and murder charges (Weekly Worker January 13). Oh dear! Your knowledge of anarchism has been shown to be repeatedly rather poor. Sacco and Vanzetti were framed on charges of murder and armed robbery - certainly not rape.
This reminds me of the article on May Day, when you claimed that its origins were down to six strikers being shot down in Chicago rather than the hanging of four anarchist orators and organisers (Weekly Worker April 29 1999).

You really need to get up to scratch, you know.
Nick Heath
email

Best so far
Regarding your article, ‘Strengths and limitations’ on the relative merits of Lenin and Trotsky, I love this piece of work (Weekly Worker October 8 1998). It has helped me with my research and it’s the best I have seen on the subject so far.
Kukiriza Moses
email

No STWC crèche
You would have thought that, after last year’s row, the Stop the War Coalition might have realised their error; but if so, you would have been wrong. Once again, they have decided that there will be no crèche at the national conference, because “we simply can’t afford one”.

A campaign to which nearly every union in the country is affiliated “can’t afford” a crèche at its annual conference. There’s no suggestion that, if finances are so tight, something else might be cut - say, the PA system at conference, or fares to international meetings in Cairo or wherever.

After last year’s argument, Ghada Razuki wrote to me: “For future meetings we would look into the possibility of having crèches at our conferences. Our treasurer Linda Smith is investigating the cost of this and will report back to the next steering committee.” But I have been assured by a sympathetic steering committee member that no report was ever given, and there has been no discussion.
I’m too despondent even to get very angry any more: I’ve come to expect this by now. Once again, people with childcare responsibilities (still overwhelmingly women) are being excluded from active politics.

At my union branch meeting last night (Amicus Central London), we agreed a motion deploring the absence of a crèche and calling for this to be rectified at future conferences. Even if it is passed (and surely they wouldn’t dare oppose it - or would they?), I don’t really expect anything to change. Any suggestions?
Roland Rance
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