Weekly Worker 574 Thursday April 28 2005

Letters

Voluntary unity
Dave Spencer is quite right to aim for the existing left groups to merge into a multi-tendency party (Letters, April 21). But the decision to dissolve an existing group into a Socialist Alliance party would have to be a decision taken by that group itself, not imposed by an SA majority. In other words, a successful merger, in which separate groups become tendencies in a united party, must be a voluntary merger.

Requiring each existing group to close down their organisation and publications before joining his Socialist Labour Party was one of Arthur Scargill’s infamous anti-democratic measures. Similarly, the recently failed Liverpool-based United Socialist Party tried to require that all participating groups wind themselves up entirely within a year. The SA, on the other hand, showed in practice for a significant period that organised groups can combine into a united party while maintaining a separate existence.

The principle of democratic centralism combines (in flexible measure, according to circumstances) unity in action with freedom of expression - including the right for political tendencies to organise themselves as factions and to publish. Unity cannot be imposed, and there is nothing to be gained by requiring the dissolution of existing groups. That is something each group will do when it is ready, just as members of an SA party will form a new faction when they feel the need, and wind it up when they are ready.

Of course, we should not aim to have factions, nor even tendencies. We should aim for ideological and political unity. But this can only be achieved through freedom of expression - limited only by the implementation of practical decisions. The culture of open polemic is the appropriate mechanism for overcoming factional differences, including differences between existing groups, whether or not they unite organisationally. Organisational unity means practical unity, the ability to carry out more effective actions.

To the extent that political and ideological unity develops through unity in action and open polemic, separate organisation will be discarded, as will factional organisation. Imposing dissolution would only hinder the process.
Stan Keable
London

SSP democracy
I have been expelled from the Scottish Socialist Party in all but name, following the behaviour of Carolyn Leckie and Kevin McVey at party conference in 2004. Leckie pulled two of our branch’s motions and when we asked her to give an account all hell broke loose. The matter is still unresolved but the leadership know. Airdrie/Coatbridge branch is in turmoil but they are desperate to keep a lid on it. People are leaving the branch in numbers. Local opinion has been affected.

I have been politically active since the miners’ strike. I joined the Militant Tendency in 1989 and was expelled from the Labour Party in 1991 for being a member of Militant. I went with the Scottish turn and the Taaffeites and was a founding member of Scottish Militant Labour. I was on the editorial board of the Militant newspaper for a short time.
I was a founder-member of the Scottish Socialist Alliance, and a founder-member of the SSP and stood in the 2001 general election. I was instrumental in setting up a branch in the Airdrie/Coatbridge area and have held all the elected positions within the branch, including education officer. In 2003, I had influenced a couple of members in the ideas of Marxism and gradually a mood of frustration began to grow in the branch over the drift to nationalism and the manner it was being used to subjugate the class struggle.

Our grouping was also very concerned about the lack of democracy (leading members like Kevin Williamson were making comments which were not party policy and indeed sometimes were anti-socialist). We were concerned about the calibre of candidates who had suddenly appeared and whose boots we could feel on our shoulders, as they unashamedly rushed forward to take positions and engage in manoeuvring and intrigue. We criticised Scottish Socialist Voice for its lack of socialist analysis and the use of columnists, when minority groups with valid points were being ignored.

In 2003, our branch, with eight members in attendance, passed unanimously two motions concerning the lack of democracy and the conduct of the full-time organiser, Kevin McVey, and the list MSP, Carolyn Leckie. Due to unforeseen circumstances, nobody from our branch was able to attend the conference to move the motions. The constitution states that in such cases the motions should have been remitted for the national executive council to consider. Carolyn Leckie and Kevin McVey simply withdrew the motions (one of which was in direct opposition to one of Carolyn’s) without consulting anyone, least of all the organising committee at conference.

The branch members were angry that such a thing had happened and felt they had been badly treated. They were concerned that certain members had in effect treated them with contempt. As a result, after discussion, the Airdrie/Coatbridge branch agreed that we should ask both McVey and Leckie to come along to the branch at their earliest convenience to explain themselves. The following meeting resulted in Leckie walking out saying that she had better things to do than listen to the likes of us.

When she was present, certain points were put to her about having a conflict of interest with one of the motions and she replied that her motion would have won anyway. She stressed that we had no power to discipline her and someone pointed out that it was ironic that she was aware of this rule, but not of the one regarding binning motions which busy working people had spent time discussing and drawn up, prepared and voted unanimously to put before the conference.

Since then, myself and another comrade, Gordon Martin, have been isolated and lies, rumours and accusations of all sorts made against us. We wrote to Allan Green, national secretary, and sent copies of all the correspondence to Colin Fox and Richie Venton and to the Airdrie/Coatbridge branch secretary, Jim Moffat. We received a cheeky letter back from Green telling us basically to shut up. Since then, the only correspondence of any note we have received from the SSP was a begging letter for funds for the general election. In that time the branch has held an AGM and basically stitched up positions for themselves.

Last week, Martin and I were both delegates at the STUC at Dundee, where we spoke to Colin Fox. We told him he had one week to sort the matter out or we would publicly declare we were no longer members. The full-timer phoned Gordon Martin today to ask him to help out in the election campaign. Martin has demanded he meet with us, but the full-timer continues to hold that he and Leckie have done nothing wrong.
Kenny McGuigan
email

Wake-up call
The threats against and physical intimidation of George Galloway whilst campaigning in Bethnal Green is deeply disturbing but this may serve as a wake-up call for the Respect coalition, the Stop the War movement and the Socialist Workers Party (‘Islamic extremists attack Galloway’ Weekly Worker April 21).

Since their inception both the STWC and Respect have pandered incessantly to the muslim community in an opportunistic way to get bodies onto the streets or votes on the ballot papers. It seems that these organisations have treated the muslim community as a lumpen, uniform mass and have ignored the class and political differences within it. As in any faith-based grouping, there are progressive and reactionary elements, but this has been swept aside and to suggest a debate about the more reactionary elements amongst the islamic adherents sees oneself labelled as racist or an islamophobe.

Both Respect and the STWC have relied too heavily on getting their message across to muslims by using the imams and the mosques. It would have been far better to use the organs of the working class to appeal to muslim workers and not the often deeply reactionary imams. This train of thought has led to Respect slowly shifting to the right.
With Galloway’s backward, pro-life stance, socialism seems to be the last thing Respect wants now and it seems the entire organisation seems to exist merely as a Galloway/SWP road to parliament. What a tragic waste.
Kristian Carter
Belarus

So be it
Samuel Esselt claims that I “cannot grasp how any Labour candidate can be described as working class” (Letters, April 21).

The point I was actually making (as I made clearer in my letter in the April 21 issue) was that, like SWP candidates standing for Respect, Labour candidates can only be considered working class in a sociological sense (actually many, if not most, LP candidates would be more accurately described as petty bourgeois).

I do indeed find it hard to see how voting for any member, no matter how ‘left’, of this viciously anti-working class governmental party has anything to do with fighting for the independent interests of our class. From this more important (to communists at least) point of view, they are not “working class candidates”.

If that makes me a sectarian in the eyes of a Labourite like Samuel then so be it.
John Watson
email

Independence
So John Watson supports the Independent Working Class Association and the SSP on the basis that they “openly” stand for the “independence of our class” (Letters, April 21). True, that is what the IWCA’s name suggests, and the SSP stands for an “independent socialist Scotland”.

But from this it strikes me that comrade Watson has not the slightest idea of what Marxists mean by ‘working class independence’. Working class independence is only possible through Marxist theory, a Marxist programme and a Marxist party.

The IWCA are localists through and through, as the SSP is nationalistic through and through. That is, they are anti-Marxist and therefore spontaneously adopt the bourgeois politics of sectionalism.
Enso White
London

Critical support
Alan Davis of the International Bolshevik Tendency says that the Bolshevik slogan demanding the sacking of the 10 capitalist ministers was a “precondition for any kind of critical support” for Russia’s provisional government (‘Stalinism versus Trotskyism’ Weekly Worker April 21).

I think he makes an elementary mistake.

Lenin called for the overthrow of the provisional government in April 1917 not primarily because of its class composition. Rather the underlying reason was its pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist politics. The provisional government refused to redistribute land to the tiller, it refused to give power to the workers in the factories, it refused to pull out of the imperialist war.

Demanding the sacking of the 10 capitalist ministers was merely a tactical device to highlight the political nature of the provisional government, whose main support rested on the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties in the soviets.

When the 10 capitalist ministers duly went, the Bolsheviks did not offer “critical support”. But maybe comrade Davis thinks they were wrong.
Conrad West
London

Black hole
Further to my letter in last week’s Weekly Worker, Leeds Stop the War Coalition declined to support ex-Socialist Workers Party member Mick Dear, standing in Leeds Central as an anti-war candidate, at the STWC meeting last week.

My resolution - calling for the LSTWC to offer critical support to “any working class candidate standing in principled opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq by imperialist forces” - was not passed. The wording of the resolution might well have been a foreign language for some of those present. Sadie, the Leeds SWP organiser, didn’t know what a “working class candidate standing in principled opposition” meant. The idea of critical support was nonsense to some and intriguing to others: there were those who saw it in terms of political black and white and were confused by the notion, while others found it an interesting concept.

One member got a little angry at the idea of support for working class candidates, as his Labour MP had been against the war before it began and he was most definitely a middle class gentleman. Confusion between Marxist ABC and ‘taken for granted’ bourgeois definitions is the biggest divider of the revolutionary left from its immediate periphery.

The SWP is falling into a black hole now, an abyss filled with centrist parties that have fallen into decline; strangled bureaucratically and consumed by dogma, they have formed popular fronts and lost their relevance to anybody, even themselves.

SWPers, get your act together. Read, polemicise, expose yourselves to other revolutionaries; there is no other way to go beyond your current horizons. In the CPGB, we would much prefer to see you enhance your revolutionary practice and take it to a new level and not, through sectarian selfishness, squander away knowledge passed down through years of service to your class and allow your organisation to do the same.

I’m sure there is much we can learn from one another. Up your game, comrades.
Sachin Sharma
Leeds

So clear!
Everyone recognises that there was some kind of alliance between the Bolsheviks and Kerensky against the Kornilov coup attempt in 1917 - my dispute with the CPGB is over whether that alliance involved any political support.

Peter Manson argues: “When the Bolsheviks entered into a ‘fighting alliance’ with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (not Kerensky, as comrade Keller states) against Kornilov, that too was a political alliance, however fleeting” (Letters, April 21).
Let us remind ourselves of what Lenin had to say on the matter: “... a Bolshevik would tell the Mensheviks: ‘We shall fight, of course, but we refuse to enter into any political alliance whatever with you, refuse to express the least confidence in you’”. And later: “Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But that is not the same thing ...”

So which of these towering Marxist intellects are we to side with in this dispute over whether there was a political alliance between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks against Kornilov? Manson or Lenin? I’m sure the readers of the Weekly Worker are having as much trouble deciding as I am.

Manson ends his latest contribution to this exchange by playing what he imagines to be a trump card - describing as “political” the agreement between the Bolsheviks and German government for Lenin to cross German territory. But in doing so he only manages to expose his hopeless confusion on the question.

I do indeed think that this arrangement was a ‘military’ - or perhaps better a ‘technical’ - temporary ‘alliance’. I certainly do not think that it represented a ‘political alliance’ involving any degree of political support for the German government by the Bolsheviks - on the other hand maybe that really is the position of Manson and the CPGB.

What the CPGB seem to saying is that all alliances are necessarily political alliances. But they are then left completely unable to explain Lenin’s explicit opposition to any kind of political alliance with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries and yet at the same time entering into a temporary alliance, of some kind, with them against Kornilov. Would the CPGB accept that there is a difference between say an “alliance involving some degree of political support” and an “alliance involving purely technical or military arrangements”?

The former of these describes, for instance, the CPGB’s call for a vote for Respect and the latter the Bolshevik/Menshevik alliance against Kornilov in1917 and the CPGB’s advice to working class militants in regard to the islamic resistance against the Iraqi occupation in 2005.

Manson’s differentiation between principled and unprincipled alliances is just a smokescreen, as within both the distinct categories of ‘alliance involving some degree of political support’ and the ‘alliance involving purely technical or military arrangements’ there will be principled and unprincipled alliances. But to use that to attempt to disguise the reality of the difference between political alliances and military/technical alliances (that Lenin is so clear about!) is the worst kind of revisionist sophistry.
Simon Keller
email

Charity culture
Simon Byrne (Socialist Workers Party) wrote that the CPGB was being a “tad hypocritical” in suggesting that the SWP was bowing “yet again” to charity by supporting Make Poverty History when the CPGB themselves recommended “charities to give to” after the Asian tsunami (Letters, April 21).

The CPGB on the contrary, after the Asian tsunami, urged that aid not be collected for charity, but specifically for “genuinely democratic organisations in south Asia ... appropriate trade unions, working class and peasant women’s groups, leftwing political parties and campaigns, etc” (Eddie Ford Weekly Worker January 6). Comrade Ford went on and made the point that it didn’t take too much imagination to work out what the Indonesian government, for one, would have done with a ‘windfall’ generated by a combination of debt cancellation and various aid packages. The CPGB were correct in calling for aid along class lines.

Simon Byrne further states: “Make Poverty History is not a charity. It is in fact a form of pressure group designed to campaign and act for social justice and reform of present trade rules.” Whilst MPH is a campaign as such, and not specifically a charitable organisation, several charities are affiliated to it and the key point is that the predominant underlying ethos of the campaign is to encourage a more charitable approach by the rich countries towards the poor countries over debt relief, fair trade and aid.

Ford, by contrast, stressed the importance of not bowing down to “charity culture”. A culture that distributes “money and other forms of aid in a way that can only but reinforce existent power structures and hence the inequality and corruption that keeps millions in poverty and dependence”.

Mark Fischer makes the point that communists should fight for solidarity and not charity when trying to rid the globe of poverty: “Solidarity is practical aid and support in the struggle to take our destinies into our own hands - even during a period of acute crisis such as natural disaster” (Weekly Worker March 31).

The G8 protest in Gleneagles starting on July 2 provides an excellent opportunity for revolutionaries to argue against the gross inequality and poverty caused by the capitalist system and for the need for a socialist/communist alternative to be fought for.
Michelle Euston
email

Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin was a very courageous woman who raised some very sensitive issues that the liberal consensus under consumer capitalism prefers to ignore - the main one being the economic exploitation of vulnerable, poor women in the ‘sex industry’ (‘What did Andrea Dworkin do for women?’ Weekly Worker April 21). She was correct to target the crimes that this so-called ‘industry’ is getting away with under the guise of liberalism, freedom of expression and the free market.

I would only question the blurring of distinction between the written word and the electronic media: the former is purely a product of the imagination, while the production of the latter - whether as sex magazines, films, etc - depends on exploitation of individual women. If you believe that ‘sex workers’ have free choice in a market economy then quite simply you are accepting capitalism. As a socialist I don’t come to this conclusion myself.
David Morgan
email

Cartesian
I would like to express my appreciation of your efforts at the Weekly Worker, which I have been reading this afternoon.

I have for many years been (loosely) associated with the Socialist Workers Party, despite extreme reservations about the latter, on the basis it represented the most progressive platform in the current conjuncture, and that I had joined the International Socialists when a student in the late 60s. This did represent a major (admittedly opportunist) change in direction for me personally, given that in the early 70s, I had been linked with ‘Stalinism’ (whatever that was/is meant to mean): indeed, some of the comrades that I was involved with (postgraduate students) were of the opinion that ‘Trotskyism’ was implicitly counterrevolutionary - a position which my liberal (petty bourgeois) background rendered dubious.

Your paper, however, has forced me to eschew my philosophical consciousness; at last I have found an organisation which presents a genuine Leninist position and programme (yes! the Communist manifesto was not a “pamphlet” but indeed a programme!) with which I would like to work.

I personally do have differences of opinion with what appear to be your positions on certain issues, particularly the contributions of Louis Althusser. Although basically a Cartesian, I agree with Norman Geras (formerly of the International Marxist Group) that his concept of the problematic is a major addition to the corpus of Marxist theory and, moreover, that his focus on the articulation of levels within a given social formation offers an escape from crude reductionism and mechanical (Engelian) distortions of Marxist-Leninist thought.

I am proceeding to peruse back copies of your paper; and if I can offer you any assistance in your struggle, I would be only be too happy to oblige.
Nick Belford
London

Idiots
“Last week we clocked up a record 16,673 e-readers” (Weekly Worker April 21). Gosh-oh!

Haven’t you heard of disaster movies? Yes, I confess, I love them, and so I read your weekly rubbish. There is a horrible, and irresistible, fascination about watching idiots in action, and - of course - about childish gossip. Don’t get the impression that you rise above the sort of nonsense I could/would watch on TV if we could receive a service.
Tony Horne
email

Ultra-nats
Bob Goupillot is right, Alan Fox is wrong (Letters, April 21). His Republican Communist Network are not “ultra-nats”: just common or garden left nationalists. They organise exclusively in Scotland, as opposed to in/against the United Kingdom state. And naturally as left nats their aim is an “independent socialist Scotland”.
Suzano Tavistock
Manchester

Moot point
The RMT Rail Against Privatisation campaign came to Manchester on April 23. Although the march was small, it was lively and ended with a rally at the Mechanics Institute, where the RMT general secretary spoke.

Bob Crow’s speech was not particularly good - I got the impression that he wasn’t speaking from notes, but just on the hoof. On one thing though he was very firm. There are no regrets about the split from the Labour Party. He defended the approach of setting up the 13-strong parliamentary group, but made it clear that no other Labour MPs would receive RMT financial or physical backing.

How long he can hold this line, though, when there is no alternative to Labour other than in Scotland is a moot point.
Peter Grant
Manchester

Respect and drugs
I was disappointed, but not surprised, to read about Respect’s approach to dealing with drugs in its election manifesto (Weekly Worker April 21).

Mark Fischer is correct in pointing out that Respect’s ideas are really not very different from the mainstream parties. With its intention to focus on the “detection of dangerous drugs, educating young people that embracing the drug culture is a road to despair and then breaking up the criminal gangs who feast on the misery of the drug-stricken”, Respect is obviously appealing to popular misconceptions rather than attempting to win them over to a principled policy.

George Galloway would not have to step very far from his east London offices to recognise the huge problem of crack cocaine and heroin use in Tower Hamlets and Hackney and how this impacts on the community through crime, yet Respect seems more intent on winning votes. Only by taking a much more radical approach, like that outlined by Steve Rolles in his Socialist Worker article ‘End the war on drugs’ (April 23) can any real changes take place.

In his article Steve highlights the need for the supply and regulation of drugs through prescription, pharmacy sales and licensed retail. This would drastically reduce crime and the prison population, freeing up billions of pounds that could be spent on drug treatment, harm reduction programmes, education, employment and many other things that would benefit our communities and help stop people from turning to drugs in the first place.
Dominic Smith
London

Correction
In last week’s paper, I wrote a report on an islamic extremist provocation against comrade George Galloway while he was campaigning for Respect in Bethnal Green (Weekly Worker April 21). In that piece, I quote a comment attributed to George from the London Evening Standard, which covered the story. He was reported as saying that “I was meeting people who live in the flats. Hizb-ut-Tahrir suddenly filled the room and blocked the door” (April 20).

A statement has now appeared on the Respect website, posted April 22, which refers to the Evening Standard “wrongly naming Hizb-ut-Tahrir as the organisation responsible for the attack on George Galloway. When members of the Respect national office saw the report, they informed the Evening Standard that we were certainly not claiming that Hizb-ut-Tahrir were behind the attack.

“A short time later we were contacted by Jalal and Qusim from Hizb-ut-Tahrir who assured us it was not HT who were responsible. We immediately passed on this assurance to the Standard and provided them with contact details to confirm this with Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The Standard reporter we spoke to said that the Standard should have researched their story better and not named HT as the organisation responsible. We were assured the report would be corrected in later editions of the Standard and we understand this was done.

“In fact, the attack was carried out by an organisation called al-Ghuraaba, an offshoot of the disbanded al-Muhajiroun, who subsequently invaded another of our meetings in Luton.”
Ian Mahoney
London

Print this page