Weekly Worker 572 Thursday April 14 2005

Letters

Consistency
I found Peter Manson’s article most instructive (‘The right to say what is’, April 7). In it, he advises the Scottish Socialist Party to take immediate steps to have Kevin Williamson expelled for apparently urging a boycott of its candidates in the general election.

The problem with this from the CPGB’s point of view, of course, is that just a couple of weeks earlier Peter himself wrote an article openly calling on people to boycott half of Respect’s candidates in the coming election. According to the report in your paper, this absurd policy was approved at a CPGB aggregate with one lone dissenting voice.

I look forward to reading Peter’s next article advocating the expulsion of CPGB members from Respect for violating the democratically agreed Respect policy of actually supporting its candidates. However, as ‘consistency’ was not one of the four headings under which Ian Mahoney explained the CPGB’s approach to polemical exchange, I am not holding my breath.
Nick Bird
Lowestoft

Objection
In relation to Tom Delargy’s exclusion from the SSP Debate list, Peter Manson writes: “Disgracefully, not one comrade raised an objection to the appallingly high-handed treatment meted out.”

Yet on March 25 I posted the following: “I am against excluding Tom from the list. I don’t think he has written anything to justify exclusion. He does tend to personalise matters in his contributions, but his basic critique of others is political. We should be very reluctant to silence critical voices. It has a bad history.”
I wonder, though, why Tom himself has not raised his exclusion on the UK Left Network list.
Sandy McBurney
Workers Unity platform

Sloppy
Peter Manson’s article includes an attack on the Workers Unity platform of the SSP, where our alleged failure to defend comrade Tom Delargy and criticise his exclusion from the SSP Debate list is put forward.

I believe we are due an apology on two grounds: one, as comrade Sandy McBurney has pointed out, we have defended comrade Delargy and protested his exclusion from the list. This is not the only occasion we have defended him against the nationalists of the SSP - despite our differences with Tom and the fact he has spent the last several months attacking Workers Unity on all the discussion lists he is on.

Secondly, it seems at best sloppy that you make allegations against us in your press without bothering to ask us our opinion on the matter or if we have any evidence to the contrary - you have in the past been willing to ask us for information, so why not this time? This is hardly the way to present an accurate picture of events, comrades.
Matthew Jones
Workers Unity

Raise our game
With regard to Peter Manson’s article, I am sitting in the Freedom of Speech cafe of Berkeley University surrounded by photos of students insisting on their rights in the 60s. The photos and articles bring home how vitally important freedom of speech really is.

I think Tom should have had the right to say what he did and have long argued that Eddie Truman is an abuser of power who ought to be removed as moderator of the SSP discussion list. I put a comment on the Workers Unity discussion forum to this effect at the time - as did Sandy McBurney.

Eddie’s intolerance always seems to be targeted at the same individuals - those who are against the independence position. It’s a bit like the old sketch on Not the nine o’clock news, where the police officer just happens to harass the same black man over and over again, while claiming that he has not really noticed the colour of the man’s skin to his superior (no doubt there will be a reply from Eddie in which I am accused of making him out to be a racist).

Having said that, it is difficult to hold the moderator to account for engaging in personal abuse if Tom and others then do the same thing - which is not to say that a one-off personal rebuke born out of frustration should be treated in the same way as routine personal abuse.

The WU platform does need to raise its game and we are trying to. We have created a website, held a fringe meeting at SSP conference and hope to create a pamphlet (something largely held back due to finances and not anything else - maybe the CPGB could help out here?).

CPGB comrades who are formally part of the WU platform did not show at the pre-SSP AGM meeting - nor have they contributed to the discussion forum. And Tom D resigned because we would not support a CWI ‘independent socialist Scotland’ motion at conference.

So perhaps CPGB comrades and sympathisers need to raise their game too in relation to making inroads against the current nationalist position of the party.
Pete Burton
Berkeley

Scum
I’ve just read Peter Manson’s hysterical article about the Scottish Socialist Party.
Being called an ultra-nationalist by you is an honour. I’d much rather be for an independent Scottish workers’ republic as part of a socialist world than British nationalist, state-sponsored scum like yourselves. If you’re going to have a pop at me personally, try to make it funny, eh? And please feel free to pass this email on to special branch - we know you pass everything else on to them.

Keep it up, my good fellows. You put the ‘Great’ into ‘British’!
John Patrick
SSP animal rights spokesperson

UK socialism
You argue against Scottish nationalism, as it is not internationalism - but then you see no problem with British nationalism, which is equally non-internationalist. You support UK-wide institutions and are prepared to accept UK-wide socialism. Your ‘internationalism’ argument is therefore null and void.

What remains? British imperialism. Your aims and actions are exactly those of the British imperialist state. By insisting on UK-wide socialism and arguing for the retention of the British imperialist state you seek to dominate and suppress Scotland and ensure that Scotland will never be a socialist country. Whether wittingly or not, you are doing the work of the British imperialist state and supporting the elitist British establishment.

I’m sure you’re proud of yourself.
Neil Caple
email

Nothing more
British nationalism is fundamentally racist. Scottish nationalism is fundamentally anti-racist. Nothing more to be said really.
Charles McGregor
email

CPGB dialectics
CPGB leader Mark Fischer argues that we should vote for some ‘left’ Labour candidates (‘Vote Labour anti-war’, April 7). So why would workers want to vote for any candidates of this viciously anti-working class government, you might ask?

We are told that it is another application of the CPGB policy of calling “for votes only for working class candidates who opposed the Iraq war and demand an immediate end to the occupation”. One might, of course, wonder how any candidate of this pro-big business government could be described as a “working class candidate”, but let us leave that aside and move to the main justification for this position - that they are anti-war.

However, it would seem that to be worthy of support by the CPGB your “anti-war” position doesn’t have to run too deep either. Mark himself realises that, of these Labour candidates the CPGB will support, “Many will, of course, have soft, pro-imperialist illusions in a ‘positive’ alternative of a ‘policing role’ for United Nations forces or even a coalition of reactionary Arab states. Despite that, under the concrete circumstances that apply in Britain today these candidates should be supported.”

So, just so long as you oppose the occupation of Iraq by the current US-UK-led coalition, you are anti-war - even if you support the continuation of that occupation by the imperialist den of thieves that is the United Nations!

Another dollop of CPGB ‘dialectics’, I suppose.
John Watson
email

Brittle
John Watson seems to be advocating the brittle politics of ‘leftwing’ communism: in other words childish sectarianism (Letters, April 7). He argues against voting for working class candidates who demand the withdrawal of British troops on May 5. In the name of dialectics (read purity), he says, if elected they would be “much less likely” to defend our class because they are a “bunch of opportunists”.

Indeed they are. And indeed, either collectively, or individually, they probably will follow that well trod path to the right and accommodation with capitalism. But I think in his determination to slag off the CPGB, no matter what, comrade Watson misses the point. Instead of trying to think, he instantly rushes to condemn. A regrettable mistake.
The purpose of any communist support for Respect, left Labour, SSP, Socialist Party in England and Wales and other such candidates is not to passively second-guess who is most likely to turn out on a picket line. That would be stupid. Communists must deploy tactics which can achieve the most decisive political intervention. That can never be done through isolationism. Communists must correctly locate and then exploit the main political issue: ie, the point of greatest political purchase. Today in Britain that is undoubtedly class, not least in Respect, and the question of Iraq.

The duty of communists does not stop with criticism. We must do more than issue health warnings - do not trust those bastards: they are a “bunch of opportunists”. Communist support is first and foremost designed to build the alternative: ie, the organisation of communists. To the extent that this is achieved, then, as a by-product, yes, even the worst opportunists will want to be seen defending the interests of the working class. That is dialectics.

Surely that is exactly why in the past communists such as Lenin urged the CPGB to support the election of a Labour government - though it would be led by that rotten opportunist Ramsay MacDonald. A man who was expelled from his local golf club because of his social pacifism during World War I, but who a few years later, in order to prove his complete loyalty to the bourgeois system, promised the king that Liberals would be given seats in his cabinet. As it turned out, about the only promise he kept.
Were Lenin and the CPGB correct to support MacDonald’s Labour Party “like the rope supports the hanged man”? In my opinion this was correct tactics.
Enso White
London

Wrong Harry
In an otherwise excellent article Mark Fischer makes an error by identifying our friend and comrade Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton and Wanstead, as a defector from Labour Against the War (‘Vote Labour anti-war’, April 7). Harry has not defected from LATW. He has been with us since the start of the campaign. I reproduce below his statement to the LATW AGM of February 5:

“Nothing of significance about western policy in Iraq has been right. It has been a ‘role model in reverse’. The occupation has delivered a near-failed state that has killed many Iraqis, but is also dangerous for other parts of the world, including us in the UK. For an opportunity for peace in Iraq, western troops need to leave.”
I believe the MP that Mark should have named as the defector is Harry Barnes, retiring MP for North East Derbyshire.

Perhaps by way of recompense Mark could do a few hours canvassing for Harry Cohen in his bid for re-election? To contact his campaign telephone 020 8926 3125 or email harry.cohen1@ntl-world.com.
Stephen Beckett
LATW campaign coordinator

Can I take it?
My last letter published in the March 24 edition of the Weekly Worker remains unanswered. Can I take this silence as agreement by CPGB comrades that there is an important distinction between “political alliances” and “fighting alliances”?

That therefore the Bolsheviks had a “fighting alliance” with Kerensky against Kornilov in 1917, while remaining totally opposed to any “political alliance” with the provisional government, or its left wing in the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries?

That therefore the communist position in current-day Iraq is one of a “fighting alliance” with the islamist/Ba’athist resistance against the imperialist occupiers, while remaining totally opposed to any “political alliance” with them?
Simon Keller
email

True control
Mike Macnair has a bizarre notion of women ‘controlling their bodies’ if he thinks it is being spread on an operating table, suffering an invasive procedure at the hands of a (usually male) doctor, and risking physical and emotional trauma (Letters, March 31).
If we had true control we would not have to contemplate abortion, as we would use contraception more reliably and be more in touch with our natural cycles.
Contraception and child-rearing are as much a man’s responsibility as a woman’s - a fact that many leftwing men choose to be in blissful ignorance about.

The values of capitalism involve a selfish individualism, so-called ‘rights’ abstracted from any social context and alienation from oneself and others. The values of socialism, on the other hand, involve respect for all human (and in my view also animal) life, the mutual cooperation and interconnectedness between oneself and others. The philosophy behind most ‘pro-choice’ arguments lies with the former, not the latter, set of values. I would have less of a problem with communists if they admitted that abortion was a sad result of class society and oppression, but instead they join hands with the libertarian right and use their slogans.

However, Mike Macnair has a point when he raises the call for appropriate social measures for women who do want to continue with pregnancies, but this would involve more than simply childcare. The measures would be far more radical, and would have a vast impact on the lives of men, as well as women. If such measures were put in place, a majority of women would not ‘choose’ abortion.

But at least he goes as far as to vaguely address the issue - which is more than can be said for Louise Whittle, our self-professed ‘feminist’. Her preoccupation with abortion makes her forget the basic feminist and socialist demands in regards to parenting.
Liz Hoskings
South London

Gay marriage
I and two other members of the gay human rights group, Outrage, were temporarily detained by the police under section 44 of the Terrorism Act outside Windsor Guildhall on April 8. We were protesting against the ban on same-sex marriage, as Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles were married.

Charles and Camilla had to battle legal obstacles to get married. We want gay couples to have the right to marry too. The government ban on same-sex marriage is discrimination and is illegal under the Human Rights Act. Lord Falconer justified the Charles and Camilla wedding on the grounds that the Human Rights Act says everyone is entitled to marry. Why, then, is his government refusing to allow same-sex couples to get married?

If the government and the church can engineer the law to allow Charles and Camilla to marry, why can’t they amend the law to legalise marriage for lesbians and gays? The new same-sex civil partnerships law is not legal equality. It enshrines and perpetuates homophobic discrimination. We want marriage law opened up to gay couples.
The vast majority of the crowds at Windsor backed our call for an end to ban on same-sex marriage. We received a lot of public support. Only a handful of die-hard monarchists objected to our protest.
Brett Lock
Outrage

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