Weekly Worker 571 Thursday April 7 2005

Letters

Direct action

Sarah Young’s article was a welcome change, serving to illustrate the many (rightish) similarities between the SWP and CPGB (‘Networks of resistance’ Weekly Worker March 31).

However, is she right in boldly stating: “We are not going to stop wars without taking industrial action”? Was it really the American trade unions striking which ended the Vietnam war? Would it be honest to claim ‘the unions’ forced the US out of Lebanon? Who remembers the Russian trade unions forcing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan? What about those decades of British industrial action against the empire? Which strikes caused Spain to pull out of Iraq and why is Italy considering withdrawing troops?

While Sarah advocates solidarity with Iraqi human rights groups, these don’t include those resisting the occupation! She only offers solidarity with those passively suffering. Next to her article Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq only speaks out against some human rights abuses and not others. She highlights one terrible killing, but ignores 100,000 others. Her programme for “freedom-loving people” is to aid the US military by expelling those who fight against national oppression. Some of the left’s dogma suggests resistance comes ‘from the bottom up’, but they fail to see that the dynamic comes from the Iraqi people against the imperialist states.

Although Sarah favours direct action in this country, it can appear to hit motorists rather than the state. While I agree “so-called revolutionaries” try to manipulate “the mass”, you shouldn’t hope to provoke a response by pissing ordinary people off.
Bob Harding
Norwich

Cretinism

So Alan Steven’s claims a deep, dialectical understanding lies behind the CPGB’s apparent contradiction on the question of who to vote for (Letters, March 31).

Alan says: “The point is to intervene precisely on the basis of programme, but not as some futile, posturing stunt, but actively in the process of a political struggle.” Fine words indeed, but unfortunately for him the game has already been given away. In the March 24 issue of the Weekly Worker your editor exposed the absurdity of your position of supposedly voting for “working class, anti-war candidates” in the coming election.

In the article ‘Drawing a class line between candidates’ we read that Janet Alder is “definitely working class sociologically. But what matters first and foremost for us is her politics ...” Unfortunately that apparent commitment to political programme is just so much bluster (or perhaps just CPGB-style “dialectics”). Elsewhere in the article we are told that the election of any of the Socialist Workers Party opportunists “would - despite the undoubted problems posed by the left populist platform they are upholding - give our movement a boost: hopefully they could act as workers’ tribunes in parliament, on the picket line, in the press”.

It is hard to think of a more pathetic justification for voting for this bunch of opportunists (as you yourselves describe the SWP). To counterpose a vague ‘hope’ they will do the decent thing if elected against the concrete platform of open class collaboration they are standing on can only be understood as the height of parliamentary cretinism. Any SWPer actually elected on Respect’s popular frontist platform would only be encouraged to continue their political evolution away from the centrality of working class independence. They would be much less, not more, likely to defend our class interests - now that is dialectics, comrades!
John Watson
email

Aussie SA

The recent article and letters in the Weekly Worker (‘Aussie SA in trouble’, March 10; Letters, March 17) initiated by Marcus Larsen have opened up a timely debate for Marxists on the currently parlous state of the left in Australia.

Sitting as they did alongside reports from the congress of Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista, they are presented in stark contrast. Whatever its limitations (which are many), we see a party of more than 60,000 comrades, debating five distinct platforms - not hidden away in national, central or any other kind of committee, but openly in front of the Italian working class. That Bertinotti’s reformist platform won the majority is clearly a setback for the Italian and European left, but the fact that a debate like this can be carried out openly is in itself a corresponding step forward.

In contrast the Australian left is mired in deep and hidden factionalism, even if this is masked by the most limited and formal ‘unity’ of grouplets within the Socialist Alliance. Comrade Fredman trawls through the SA’s election contests to find a few instances when the result wasn’t a complete and total rout, and a single instance where candidates managed to creep into double figures. The comrade is completely correct when he says that “making electoral returns the main basis for assessing a socialist party project is crass parliamentary cretinism”, but then fails to explain why in that case the revolutionary socialist groups that make up the SA have all but ditched their programmes (those that have them, that is) and have signed up to a shopping list of meek, left reformist demands. Comrades should revisit the SA’s 2004 federal election manifesto: www.socialist-alliance.org/resources/manifesto_web.pdf.

There are some positive things in here, policies that most progressives can agree with. But the formulations are distinctly reformist. They make no reference to the need to smash the capitalist state, and hardly place militant working class struggle at the centre of the fight for a socialist society. Do we really want to cut the working week, just so that we can “spread around available work”? Where is the demand for an Australian republic? Are we to take it that these reforms will be enacted through the current constitutional monarchist parliamentary system, with queen Elizabeth’s governor general watching on while a ‘ socialist’ government raises corporation tax to 49%, abolishes ASIO and cuts defence spending in half?

Comrades, this is economism of the worst order. Tellingly, the section on socialism is tucked away on the last page as an updated and very slightly left-leaning ‘light on the hill’. Socialism isn’t presented as the urgent agenda of the working class, but something to be considered only “in the end”. Let’s be fair and provide the quote in full - “In the end socialism is the only possible alternative social system to capitalism and all its evils, in Australia and around the world.”

The fact is that most of the SA’s policies could be safely argued for at an Labor Party conference and, given a shift to the left in society, much of it could be adopted by the ALP. What is bizarre - in fact cretinism of the first order - is to steal the clothes of the ALP left and then spend week after week attacking your potential allies from the pages of Green Left Weekly. If the Democratic Socialist Perspective and ‘allies’ are not vote-chasing, then why hide the real ‘revolutionary’ programmes under layers of reformist mush? What do you tell workers who sign up and join the SA: that this is just stuff for elections, but really we are building for something completely different? Don’t your cadres, let alone new recruits, find this political schizophrenia somewhat confusing, if not bloody dishonest?

A case in point is the struggle against John Howard’s industrial relation ‘reforms’. Tucked away at the bottom of the SA home page is the statement headlined “Solidarity can stop Howard’s union-busting”. In fact to defeat Howard we need a little bit more than simple solidarity - we need to develop leadership, a strategy and tactics.

In the meantime the Socialist Alliance has practically stopped functioning. There is no initiative. Branches barely meet. There is undisguised hostility between affiliates (some of whom are set to withdraw). And the DSP itself is divided at the leadership level about where next to take the lemming they’ve ended up with. Not that these disagreements are voiced openly: they are for the ‘elect’. The working-class and the DSP/SA membership must wait for a decision to come down from on high before enthusiastically embracing whatever new turn is decided upon.

The problem with the SA is similar to the crises of the left internationally. The crazy blend of third-periodism with left-reformist programmes is simply a symptom and manifestation of a far deeper malaise. In spite of projects like the Socialist Alliances in Australia and the UK, much of the left remains splintered in 57 varieties of competing sects, each with a rigid, top-down, bureaucratic regime, espousing their own version of the truth. The SA in Australia is no exception. These organisations do little to train workers in the fight for a socialist society and for most of the class they are invisible, if not irrelevant. While offering some hope at its inception in Australia, the SA project hasn’t broken from sectism; it has, if anything, deepened sectarianism. In the International Socialist Organisation it led to repeated splits.

The task for Marxists is to struggle for real unity in a fully democratic-centralist combat organisation of the working class - a Communist Party. The Weekly Worker comrades should be applauded for hosting this debate. It is a tragic irony that it takes a British-based communist paper to publish these ideas rather than Green Left Weekly, Socialist Worker or the Guardian.
Mike Newman
Sydney

Cymuned

I am glad Aran Jones has started to clarify Cymuned’s position on the question of the Welsh language (Letters, March 24). This is an important issue in many parts of Wales and the politics around the question need addressing.

As a communist, I am for the integration of the world’s peoples, cultures (and thus languages) on a voluntary basis. Ultimately I am for the existence of one world language, since the multiplicity of languages can be a barrier to communication. The demise of any language, though, must be a natural process and one that is accepted by a community. I personally agree that the demise in community Welsh - ie, a living language, spontaneously spoken as a ‘natural’ language - should not be as a result of an economic trend.

But we must also recognise that the adoption of English in Wales has never been simply about a wholesale enforcement by the British state. Yes, there was some degree of coercion from above but, on the other hand, the process was largely voluntary and organic on the part of the majority of the Welsh, particularly during the latter half of the 19th century. The future of the language, then, ultimately depends upon the will of the people to speak it. However, we would also fight for the right to speak it.

This is important, for, as capitalism can rip the heart out of a community through factory closures, redundancies and unemployment, communists also appreciate that it can destroy local cultures and thus language. Within this context then I personally agree that the use of the Welsh language “in every area of life is as much an expression of that freedom as is the right to a home or work within the community” (Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, Maniffesto 1992). If the economic market reflects negatively on that right, we have a duty to respond and counteract this.

The major question is how do we do this? On what politics do we fight for Welsh language rights? Having looked at Cymuned’s website, you would be forgiven for thinking that many individuals now settling in Wales are bigoted and bereft of the ability to respect language rights and local culture. It correctly points out that soaring house prices in many small Welsh communities in the ‘Fro Gymraeg’ have forced local, particularly young, Welsh speakers to urban areas, whilst an increase of non-Welsh-speaking, wealthier individuals, purchasing local properties, have left the language in such communities in a fragile state. Yet, as its website elaborates, “We welcome the in-migration of individuals from non-Welsh backgrounds into Cymru who learn Cymraeg and contribute to cultural and social life: we believe that they add to the diversity of experiences that exist in Cymru. But we do not believe that an influx into our communities of individuals who refuse to respect the existence of a minority culture is conducive to social justice, multiculturalism or linguistic diversity.”

Noting the general proclamation of Cymuned as an “anti-colonisation movement” on its website, the term “influx” from the above statement and the suggestion that Wales is currently being inundated with non-Welsh speakers, the logic of its position points to action which is potentially geared to regulating and controlling the movement of people. Indeed, it was Arun himself who toyed with this idea in a passing remark whist addressing a meeting at the London European Social Forum last October.
From our perspective, the shortage of affordable housing is a social question, which needs to be tackled as part of a working class programme, not through language vetting to protect one particular section. We demand the social provision of cheap, quality housing for all.

Whilst Wales may now already officially embrace public bilingualism, the contradictions of the Welsh Language Act of 2003, which leave the language on an uneven keel with English, still need to be addressed. Noting that Welsh-speaking individuals are not entitled, where the trial of his or her case is heard in Welsh, to have a Welsh-speaking jury and that private bodies do not have to provide facilities for the Welsh language, Welsh is still not recognised as an official language in its own country. That needs to be reversed.

For communists, the fight for Welsh language rights must start from the understanding that it is not an anti-English one. As the issue also raises important issues about individual rights and collective identity, democracy, political self-determination and how we are governed generally, it needs to be linked to a political programme which answers legitimate grievances and one which fights for extreme democracy.
Bob Davies
Swansea

Right to choose

Louise Whittle has the audacity to tell me I “ain’t a socialist, nor a feminist” (Letters, March 24).
Speak for yourself, sister. You parrot the ‘woman’s right to choose’ slogan (a liberal, not exactly a socialist, slogan, designed by male doctors to sell abortion to the American public) as if it is a religious mantra. This slogan fits in well with the ethos of choice in late capitalism, pandering to the consumerist middle classes (obviously more important to you than defending the interests of women and children - and the working class, for that matter).

I don’t mention abortion as a ‘choice’ because I don’t think it is one. Adrienne Rich (herself in favour of legal abortion) states abortion is violence, firstly to the woman herself. No woman who was free would be forced into making such a horrible choice. Germaine Greer makes similar criticisms of this destructive act being hailed as a civil liberty. Feminists with brains understand that what is in itself a result of male oppression is not a cornerstone of liberation, and they only call for it to be made legal to protect women from the harm of quack doctors - nothing more. Yet you seem to view it as a liberty and something we should rejoice in. This is not feminism.

And, face it, you do not wish to engage with my ideas not because you think I cannot be reasoned with: you simply are not capable of doing so. Just repeat your religious slogans till you are blue in the face, avoid rational debate, but don’t go accusing me of being the bigot.
Liz Hoskings
South London

Vote Yvonne

What have you got against Yvonne Ridley? She is an honest islamist, standing on the Respect platform, yet you will not support her. On the other hand, you will support the pseudo-Marxist Lindsey German and the pro-life, pro-Saddamist George Galloway, both standing on the same platform as sister Ridley.

What the hell is going on here?
Jim Denham
email

Islamophobia

Superannuated boy scouts and other fans of the outdoor life should watch out - your activities may make you liable to arrest under the new terrorism laws. On Thursday March 24 Mohammed Abu Baker Manish was arrested and held on remand after a 4am police raid on his flat, which found the name and address of a soldier, some “correspondence” and “a range of outdoor equipment, some with possible military uses”. This equipment was listed as binoculars, balaclavas, a radio scanner, respirator, sleeping bags, gloves, wellington boots, and ordnance survey maps. These ordinary objects were considered dangerous enough to make this adolescent fantasist too dangerous to be let out on bail.

A radio scanner sounds sinister, but such devices are legal and obtainable through the pages of amateur radio magazines and the like. They can be used to try and monitor police/military communications, but are principally expensive toys used by sad and lonely nerds hoping to listen into other people’s conversations in search of vicarious company. If I recall correctly, it was an eminently middle class gentleman who once ‘accidentally’ scanned and taped a very embarrassing conversation between the prince of Wales and his soon to be bride, Camilla Parker Bowles (or was it between princess Diana and James Hewitt?) In any event, the transcripts somehow or other found their way into the Sunday gutter press. Any suggestion that this was an attempt by the secret services to discredit the parties concerned is, of course, utter rubbish.

More seriously, the curious incident of Mohammed Abu Baker Manish (in this case a clear and pathetic example of islamophobic hysteria) demonstrates just how vulnerable we all could be to the deliberate misuse of the latest anti-terrorism legislation, and if Blair is re-elected there will doubtless be more to come.
Zoe Elwin
Herts

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