Weekly Worker 562 Thursday February 3 2005

Letters

Military support
For comrade J Larkin it is all so simple: while revolutionaries must refuse all “political support” to reactionary anti-imperialists, it is “obligatory” to “militarily” aid their struggle in countries such as Iraq (Letters, January 27).

If comrade Larkin were to step back for a moment and think about the meaning of these words, rather than merely repeat the Trotskyist dogma she/he has learnt so well, it might dawn on her/him that such phrases are completely devoid of any rationality. The uninitiated might be forgiven for supposing that ‘military support’ would mean the sending of armed contingents, the despatching of heavy weaponry or, at the very least, the delivery of small arms. They would then be justified in asking: is such ‘military support’ not political too? Indeed, if, in the words of Clausewitz, “war is the continuation of politics by other, military, means”, then ‘military support’ is actually political support in extremis.

In fact, if I have understood it correctly, the phrase ‘military support for’ is actually employed in lieu of ‘support for the military actions of’. Thus our Trotskyist comrades offer their (verbal) support for the armed actions of Ba’athists and islamists, but decline to voice approval of their political programme. As if the two can be separated! Whether you like it or not, you are giving propaganda (ie, political) support to military actions carried out in the furtherance of reactionary political aims.
Take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who a week before the Iraq elections “declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it”. While on some occasions his forces target the imperialist troops, on others it is shia mosques, organisations and gatherings that are hit. Of course, our Trotskyist friends can attempt to distance themselves from the latter by claiming that their “support” for such actions is “critically” given. Well, I’m sure those murdered while attending Friday prayers would be pleased to hear it.

The point is, al-Zarqawi’s ‘anti-imperialism’ is secondary to his religious war. He condemns the occupation forces for overseeing elections, through which shia parties would “install themselves in power” so as to “spread their insidious beliefs” in sunni areas. Since every action he undertakes serves his religio-political aims, to extend him ‘critical’ support (‘Attacking shia mosques is not the way to defeat imperialism, brother al-Zarqawi’) is to plumb the depths of stupidity.

Having said that, we communists are clear as to our main enemy: the imperialist oppressors. If we were forced to choose, we would prefer the victory even of the Iraqi reactionaries to that of the US-UK. But we are not forced to choose between these two evils, and it is our duty to fight for a progressive outcome through supporting only democratic, secular and working class anti-imperialists in Iraq. And, yes, we support their right, in comrade Ian Donovan’s words, “to expel the invading imperialist scum by any means necessary” (Letters, January 27).

However, we are not arguing about “means”: we are arguing about programme. It is criminal for working class partisans to offer active support - however they dress it up - to reactionaries who, if they got the chance, would imprison women, suppress trade unions and slaughter communists. That would apply even if we were forced through weakness to enter into some episodic, partial alliance with such secondary enemies.
Peter Manson
South London

Two stages
Paul Hampton writes: “I can only assume from his silence on the question that Michael Little now accepts that Trotsky was no ‘defeatist’. 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” (Letters, January 27).

I’m sorry, Paul, it was an honest oversight. To take a “defeatist” position when the United States, an imperialist country, attacks Iraq, a non-imperialist country, is to ignore the fact that there are both non-secular and secular Iraqi resistance forces and that the secular forces have subordinated themselves to the non-secular forces, which is precisely how imperialism unites the Iraqi working class with their domestic oppressors.

True Marxists (sorry, Paul), understand that the military victory of all the forces fighting the imperialist invaders is necessary in order to set the conditions whereby the working class can militarily turn against the non-secular elements.

This is not a Stalinist ‘two-stage’ theory of revolution. It’s not about establishing a bourgeois state as a stepping-stone to the eventual establishment of a workers’ state. Rather, it’s about militarily defeating the imperialist invaders so that they will withdraw, leaving the Iraqi working class to (hopefully) defeat the non-secular/anti-working class elements through civil war.

Paul goes on to say: “He detaches the end (defeating imperialism) from the means - working class self-liberation.” The end, Paul, is the establishment of a workers’ state; and defeating imperialism, rather than being an end, is actually the means. For, you see, without defeating imperialism there can be no workers’ self-liberation.

Again, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s position will lead it down the path of eventually taking a side and supporting imperialism, as no one can remain neutral in the face of imperialist aggression. Remember, comrade, you were warned.
Michael Little
Seattle

CIA front
I am extremely concerned to see the extraordinary letter defending the attack on Yugoslavia, which was clearly intended to be a sort of editorial (January 20). I was even more horrified to learn that the Weekly Worker had actually supported this in 1999.

Where exactly is “Kosova” and what is a “Kosovar” when it’s at home? The so-called “KLA” was in fact a CIA front organisation and the whole thing yet another covert operation, being part of Operation Roots, to take down Yugoslavia - Clinton signed the executive order in 1995. Training for officers at Fort Benning, training on Turkish military bases, advisors in the shape of the MPRI, supply of weapons - the full works. This has been all over the net for years now. The covert part of the operation was simply abandoned in March 1999 for overt war, having reached that stage in the operation. Worse was the use of islamic fundamentalist paramilitaries, at that time being in Amerikan employ.

The reality was, the oppression was coming from the Albanian side, the Yugoslav government being most foolish to allow a certain faction to dominate the autonomous government. The problem was to a considerable extent derived from the fact Hitler assigned Kosovo (and a part of Macedonia) to Mussolini’s Albanian protectorate in the carve-up of Yugoslavia in 1941. Many of the so-called “KLA” had connections to the wartime fascist formations and SS division. Within Kosovo Milosevic had in fact the sense to promote the old ‘Brotherhood and Unity’.

These stories of persecution and ‘genocide’ were a lie, in particular the ‘Operation Horseshoe’ story. They were of course the cover story for the operation - see the ‘park bench’ conversation in the film JFK: “We always prepare a cover story in advance for a black op ...”

I see you manage to regurgitate every propaganda cliché from Amerikan propaganda leading up to the attack. And you also managed support for the attack on Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was similar. You openly support the take-over and imposition of the free market of central and eastern Europe by US imperialism.

Incidentally, the US and its EEC acolytes do support ‘independence’ for the absolute mess that is Kosovo.
Richard Roper
email

Keep ’em out
In trying to respond to my points, comrade Kent argues that Europe is a fortress of a special kind - one that allows millions of new migrants in (Letters, January 27).

In other words the door to the fortress is half-open, if not half-closed. So multinational capital, and Blair with it, has a vested interest in maximising cheap, globalised labour. But here is where the problem starts. If the state doesn’t seek to expand the EU free trade areas, as it has done (15 new EU member-states), it would be interested in closing the fortress gates!

Like the GMB bureaucrats who at the recent European Social Forum argued, “Everyone is welcome to come to London to seek a job”, the Weekly Worker must be assuming the laws of supply and demand have become suspended in capitalist Britain. To demand open borders - which, as Lenin noted, is the “beginning of anarchy” under conditions of mass unemployment (only 74.9% of British people work and not all full-time) - is tantamount to asking bosses to solve their labour problems by always having an endless and ever expanding pool of cheap, non-unionised labour. If unions did exist which didn’t have a globalist agenda, they would seek to unionise the non-unionised and block capital’s ability to hire and fire at will. But they are demanding the exact opposite.

Whilst you allude my views are national socialist, one can only conclude yours are purely globalist in the service of sub-contracted, non-unionised firms, which constantly reduce labour costs by substituting one race of labourers with another (nurses replaced by Phillipinos, teachers, dentists, doctors, etc from all over) in capitalism’s race to the bottom. In that sense and in that sense alone bosses have indeed become primarily ‘anti-racist’ and so has their state.
I Evangelos
Haringey

EU ban?
In connection with the idiocy that Prince Harry gets up to behind supposed closed doors, I read that the EU wants a total and outright ban on the display of the swastika, and this includes Britain.

However, I can see two sides to this argument. On the one hand, I am a strong opponent of Nazism and would love to see it stamped out. Yet, on the other hand, it is an attack on civil liberties to suppress the symbol of a particular political allegiance, whether we love it or loathe it. I have also heard that the EU is thinking about banning the hammer and sickle, so if we are to oppose the banning of our communist symbol, we must also oppose the banning of the swastika (which also happens to be a buddhist and hindu symbol).
Simon Byrne
email

Ultra-left
I was disappointed, but not surprised, by the riposte by Jack Conrad to the transcript of my talk on independence and socialism in Scotland (‘Expel him from the SW platform’, January 27).

I welcomed the opportunity to speak at your Communist University event last year and did so in the spirit of constructive, fraternal debate. I think it would, therefore, have been more productive to have had Sandy McBurney’s talk alongside mine, so that it replicated the debate that actually took place. This might have been more illuminating. It would have been a direct interchange of ideas.

But what disappoints me more is that you seem incapable of identifying nuance and shade in what other people on the left argue. Everything is black and white. So people are either Marxist or non-Marxist, nationalist or internationalist, principled or opportunistic on the basis of a very restricted and simplistic definition of these terms. In similarly simplistic terms, independence in Scotland is seen only in terms of capitalist outcomes. This is intellectually unproductive and unhelpful.

The result of this political mindset is that, despite your openness to replicate different views in the organs of your organisation (which is to be welcomed), you are unable to effectively engage and debate with those ideas you replicate. The possibility of generating new insights and understanding is thus lost. It consequently undermines the rationale of your initial openness.

No one on the left wants to throw “the baby out with the bathwater”, but we need collectively to start reappraising how we apply principles, how we approach issues and how we operate. It ill behoves a left that wants to grow and become influential not to be able to engage in self-criticism and self-reflection after years of long, hard effort but little to show for in return. Unfortunately, the Weekly Worker does not seem to be able to grasp this. I would venture this is a hallmark of ultra-leftism which disfigures much of the (far) left.
Gregor Gall
Edinburgh

Academic-speak
Gregor Gall quotes statistics concerning working class socio-economic groups in Scotland and then extrapolates that “Scottish identity is primarily seen in terms of leftwing values and of being working class” (‘Scotland, social trends and socialists’, January 27).

He then goes on to present support for “Scottish independence” (ie, nationalism) as a progressive demand. He makes direct links between progressive class consciousness and nationalist ideas but with no scientific rigour. It is the equivalent of the government noting that people who shop at Sainsbury’s have more university degrees than those who shop at Kwiksave and then making shopping at Sainsbury’s part of the UK education policy.

Gall uses his position as a university professor by manipulating misleading statistical information to back up nationalist ideas that represent little more than his own personal opinions. Opinions that would be laughed at if they were unwrapped from academic-speak and proposed by anyone from a non-academic background.

Scotland is in trouble. The rural economies are waning, the population is declining and the Gaelic language is dying. Perversely, Gall’s nationalism is based on a love of the “transitional method”, not a love or concern for Scotland and its people. His contrived debate about nationalism cannot be a substitute for real discussion about what needs be done. And it is a distraction from the task of building a working class socialist movement in Scotland and elsewhere.

Gall predicts timescales in decades for progress to be made. But who is in a position to wait? Ultimately Gall’s views are of no use to us and will be ignored outside of academic circles. And, as regards the notion that internationalism is actually “inter-nationalism” rather than the expression of the universal interest of the working class, it only betrays how far he has moved from Marxist ideas and into the orbit of bourgeois ideology.
Janice MacDonald
Manchester

Blanquist
Hugh Kerr’s letter raises some important issues which I would like to deal with (Weekly Worker January 27). Mr Kerr tells us that he is a parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Socialist Party, so his ideas must be compatible with SSP membership, and a short demonstration of their utopian nature can be extended to the nature of the SSP as a whole.

Mr Kerr tells us to vote “as left as we can”, although he refrains from telling us exactly what “left” is meant to mean. Supposedly it means ‘progressive forces’ in society. He gives examples, telling us to vote Green in Brighton and Liberal anywhere we cannot find a “left alternative”. But how progressive were the Greens in Germany when they went into coalition with openly bourgeois forces? And how progressive does Mr Kerr think his Liberal friends were in 1910, when they sent the army into Tonypandy to smash a peaceful strike using boiling water, swords and cavalry?

To communists, there can be no progressive force which is not a proletarian current, and the only current which can be proletarian is that which represents the class interests of the proletariat. The class interests of the proletariat are communism, and nothing short of it, and so the question of whether the Liberals and Greens are progressive forces comes down to the question of whether they are communists or not. We know very well that they are not, and that they fully support current basic material relations in society. So what Mr Kerr is telling us to do is to vote for parties which are an expression of interests alien to ours.

This is supposedly a tactic, which will produce a minority Labour government with Liberal support (which was tried in 1924), and might “get democracy for Westminster”. Firstly, to say that democracy can exist in the bourgeois parliamentary system is a complete falsification. The bourgeois political system exists for the purpose of administering capitalism, and as long as the working class is dominated by the capitalist class ideologically, any talk of democracy is a complete sham. So Mr Kerr ought to justify why we should vote for candidates at all, which is something else he doesn’t do.
This tactic of producing a Labour minority government is supposed to help build a socialist party. How can it do this? Every time the workers vote for the parties of capitalism it reinforces their ability to ideologically dominate the working class. I have no problem with tactics, but what Mr Kerr needs to recognise is that tactics must conform to principles, and the principle of revolutionary communism, must be, as the Blanquists rightly said in 1874, “no compromise”.
Richard Cumming
Glasgow

Labour losers
Graham Bash argues that “We have to ensure that the genuine voice of Labour is heard and is not drowned out by New Labour’s warmongering din” (‘Anti-war fightback and the Blair-Brown leadership battle’, January 20). The implication is that New Labour is some kind of historical aberration from a party which is generally progressive. This is far from the case.

Some months ago radical film director Ken Loach asked: “Which party are they reclaiming?” Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party, for example? Or is it Jim Callaghan’s, Harold Wilson’s, Clement Attlee’s or Ramsay MacDonald’s?

If Bash does not like any of Ken’s Labour Parties he can always have the 1916 version, when Labour parliamentary leaders entered the war government on condition they supported legislation declaring strikes illegal. Millions died in war between rival imperialist powers. The 1924, first Labour government signed a treaty with the Iraqi puppet government allowing the RAF to bomb and gas the Kurds. The 1948 Labour government carried out the brutal suppression of rubber plantation workers in Malaya, a British colony.

The Labour Party of 1949 took the lead in proposing and setting up Nato in order to intimidate the Soviet Union with the threat of nuclear attack. The 1950 Labour government sent troops to Korea in support of the USA after North Korean communist-led forces attacked the pro-American puppet state in South Korea in order to reunify the country. Two million Koreans die in the subsequent war.

The 1965 Labour government supported the American attack on Vietnam. Another two-three million people are killed. In 1969 the nationalist community in Northern Ireland staged peaceful protests demanding the same civil rights as the ‘loyalist’ community. The RUC and the paramilitary B Specials are turned on the nationalist people who fight back on the streets. The Labour government sends troops to occupy nationalist areas and to try to crush the newly revived IRA. April to June 1999 saw the horrific Nato terror bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, fully supported by Labour, which have covered both in depleted uranium and land mines which will carry on maiming and killing people for years to come.
Where Bash is correct is when he says of the forthcoming general election: “But it is simply not good enough to abstain, to do nothing during this period of heightened political debate and mobilisation. It would be a terrible state of affairs if we simply registered our opposition to the warmongers by imposing a silence on ourselves during this time.” Bash wants us to work for “anti-war Labour candidates ... This would be doing something really worthwhile. It would be contributing to the fight to reclaim Labour as a voice for peace”.

As we noted above, the idea that Labour has ever been “a voice for peace” is absurd, and something which has never existed in the first place can hardly be ‘reclaimed’. Voting for Labour or doing nothing is a false dichotomy. An active abstention campaign which makes the point that, ‘whoever wins, the government gets in’ can begin to concretise what many working people already know on an untheorised level: the working class is going to be attacked, whatever the outcome.

We urgently need to be striving to break people from the bourgeois electoral process in order to allow even the possibility of the development of a partisan working class politics. The suggestion that we look for “anti-war Labour candidates” to support reeks of a desperate attempt to keep people involved in a corrupt political game in which they can only be losers.
Ted Talbot
Nottingham

Bring your kids
Like Roland Rance I am also appalled that there is no crèche at the Stop the War Coalition conference (Letters, January 27). I also find the excuse that they simply cannot afford one totally unacceptable. But this does seem to the pattern emerging on the left, as there have been no crèche facilities at many of the conferences I have attended within the past year. There is the Labour Against the War AGM (no crèche) and SA conference (no crèche but, hey, it’s free!) happening next weekend. There was no crèche at the Labour Representation Committee founding conference last summer.

Roland Rance raises very important issues when he says that people with childcare responsibilities have difficulties in attending conferences. Indeed, if these campaigns are serious about being inclusive then they have a duty and responsibility to pay for crèche facilities because, as Roland points out, it is women who usually bear the responsibility. I remember attending events in the 1980s and there was usually a crèche. It seems to me that this provision has fallen by the political wayside. It was an important demand in the 1970s women’s liberation movement and still is. Nothing has changed. And you would expect the left to be aware of it.

Pressure should be put on the leadership of STWC and other organisations - politically embarrass them by lobbying the speakers attending these events (some of them must have childcare responsibilities) and the executives of their organisations, by passing resolutions through trade union branches and other organisations, and so on. If all else fails, then bring your kids to the conferences and see how the organisers react. Why the hell should you be excluded?
Louise Whittle
email

Slave holocaust
I have no doubt that comrade Martin Schreader writes in good faith. He even quotes a “historian” to back up his figures of 250 million Africans taken to North America as slaves, of whom 100 million died in transit, he says (Letters, January 27).

On a quick search of the internet, the highest figure that I could find for the transportation of African slaves was 20 million to the Americas (not just North America), of which 50% died (but not in middle passage - most died in the first period of living in slave conditions on arrival). The figure of 50% refers to West Indian slaves and includes deaths in Africa and during transportation. These rates would not have been so high for North America. The lowest figure I came across was 650,000 transported to North America. My best guess produces a figure between one and five million African slaves transported to the Americas. This amounts to, at most, four million to the USA.

Clearly the comrade did not think about the statistics he was quoting. If 150 million black slaves had been in the USA before 1863, when four million were freed, then where had they all gone? In any case, if the figure was correct, why is the present population of the USA (less than 300 million) not overwhelmingly black? One thing is certain: the plantation owners were very keen to breed slaves and they would no sooner have destroyed them than they would have casually destroyed their horses or cattle.
Tom May
Guildford

Ludicrous
Martin Schreader’s claim is just ludicrous. Reputable historians working hard with the records estimate and debate figures between 10 and 20 million victims of this cruel symptom of the development of global capitalism. I’ve seen and disparaged a claim of 60 million - which seemed to be based on a Jewish-holocaust-times-10 kind of arithmetic, but the figure quoted here is just beyond the bounds of sense. How big does Martin think the slave ships were?

Also, the “historian” quoted, “Lori Robison”, must surely be Lori Robinson - journalist, rape survivor and author of a very well received work on surviving rape for African-American women, which seems to highlight the connections between the history of slavery, oppression and sexual violence. But ‘historian’ is a label applied, I think, to give spurious credibility.
Matthew Caygill
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