Weekly Worker 575 Thursday May 5 2005

Letters

Gobsmacked
I read your front page list entitled ‘Who to vote for on May 5’ (Weekly Worker April 28). I must comment that I was rather surprised not to see Jeremy Corbyn listed there. I read the article inside entitled ‘Vote Cohen, McDonnell, Qureshi and Riordan’ and was frankly gobsmacked at the reason for not calling for a vote for Jeremy.

I believe the old adage, ‘Actions speak louder than words’, and you cannot fault Jeremy Corbyn for having supported the anti-war movement wholeheartedly, including speaking at rallies calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In fact, I see him as more of a spokesperson for the anti-war movement than George Galloway! Indeed, as an Islington North Labour Party member I have been delivering leaflets stating that Jeremy has called for the troops to be withdrawn and the occupation to end.

On a second note, I find the premise of purely and simply reducing the decision on how to vote to a position on the war bizarre. Whilst it is extremely important and I would not campaign for somebody who did support the war, many of Galloway’s views on such things as secularism and abortion are extremely reactionary.

Finally, I am ever so glad that I am probably the only person in Islington North who reads the sectarian Weekly Worker, and people will be campaigning for Jeremy on his excellent record as an MP and a class fighter. I am sure constituents will have far more sense than the author of the list and your article.
Andrew Berry
Islington Unison

Bizarre
I think that your criteria for candidates to support is strange, to put it mildly. I see a glaring absence in that of Jeremy Corbyn MP. He is possibly the most consistent leftist MP in parliament and deserves more support than many of those that you put on your front page list.

Your reasoning for supporting those in the Workers Revolutionary Party and not Jeremy defies all known sense and logic. The excerpt from his speech that you quote could be contradicted by dozens of other excerpts that clarify his position. But the fact is that Jeremy opposed the war. He spoke in the USA on it and at every anti-war rally. It is also ludicrous to argue that the war is the only issue. Jeremy has supported Islington Unison in every strike and struggle we have had. Not many MPs can claim that. He is a tireless MP and fighter for good causes.

Also on an aside, if you are supporting the WRP in places like Norwich South, then why do you not support those like the Communist League candidate, Celia Pugh, in Bethnal Green and Bow? She is, after all, a supporter of the workers’ and farmers’ government for those proletarian farmers on the Isle of Dogs!

Your list is utterly bizarre and does your group no favours at all. It clearly puts you in the same league as the former ultra-leftist, turned right opportunist, Tariq Ali, who argues to bloody the nose of Tony Blair by reducing his majority and giving Michael Howard a victory. Such twisted logic should have left us in 1979. Do revolutionaries really want the return of a Thatcherite regime?
Mike Calvert
Tottenham

Vote Corbyn
I thought that you might like to know what Jeremy says in his election leaflet on Iraq: “An MP must take a stance for peace and justice; which is why I voted against the Iraq war and will always defend civil liberties. I ... will continue to stand for peace and justice around the world.”

And in the same leaflet an endorsement from Angela Sinclair, secretary of the Islington Pensioners’ Forum, states: “We’re right behind our long-standing representative, Jeremy Corbyn. From the start he opposed the war against Iraq and that stance will not be forgotten ...” It is true that the leaflet does not say anything about the occupation today.

Frankly I would take greater issue at other things in the leaflet: “The number of Islington people unemployed for more than one year fell by ... thanks to Labour’s New Deal ... I am delighted at the increased funding in every school and more resources for health that a Labour government has brought.” Like there’s no problem with PFI, academies, top-up fees, foundation hospitals - all of which he has opposed. And I was quite surprised that he said nothing about immigration, where he has had a good record of opposing government policies and supporting campaigns. I thought he would use the leaflet to at least attack Howard’s racism, if not Labour racism.

I shall still be voting for Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds that he is one of a handful of people who can be counted upon to take socialist campaigns into parliament and challenge New Labour.
Dave Landau
Islington

Vague
You distinguish between four ‘anti-war’ Labour candidates and all the others on a vague basis: “... only these four take something approaching a principled stand on the central question of Iraq, the war and the ongoing occupation”.

However, your own words prove that it’s a bit of a lottery who got into the four - “as soon as possible” is an acceptable qualification, but “speedy” isn’t. An unexplained “orderly” is OK but a “phased” one isn’t. Either a call is made for immediate withdrawal without conditions or it isn’t. If what you say is accurate, your list should really have included only two.

My view is that, although the presence of British troops in Iraq is a key question, it is not a sufficient basis for deciding whether to vote Labour. I don’t think you have really thought this through, a scepticism encouraged by the mistake in the second paragraph where you say, “Comrades Cohen, McDonnell and Riordan are all outgoing members of parliament who voted against the war.”

I think you must be confusing Linda Riordan with Alice Mahon! I understand they live next door to each other, but frankly I doubt if that’s enough.
Paul Hubert
email

Pathetic CPGB
According to the Weekly Worker, all Socialist Green Unity Coalition candidates are worthy of votes - except for Pete Radcliff of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (‘The leftovers’, April 28).

Ouch. The CPGB will be mobilising the legions of working class partisans it influences to vote for 26 SGUC candidates, but not Pete. He must have done something pretty awful to deserve this treatment. So what was it? Is Pete perhaps a supporter of New Labour’s privatisation mania? Is he in favour of the racist war against refugees and asylum-seekers? Does he back city academies and the creeping privatisation of education?
Did he support the US-UK imperialist invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? Maybe he crossed a picket line?

Nope - it’s none of these things. On all of these issues Pete has always been absolutely solid. So what was his terrible sin? It’s that he opposes the use of the slogan, ‘Troops out now’, to summarise policy towards Iraq, preferring an orientation to solidarity with working class forces fighting the occupation on the ground. It’s not even as if Pete is positively in favour of the presence of the troops - it’s simply that he (along with everyone else in the AWL) thinks that helping the Iraqi workers’ movement build up and develop fighting organisations is a more pressing practical priority than shouting ‘Troops out now’ very loudly.

In the same issue, the CPGB explained that it will be calling for votes for only four Labour candidates. Are they, perhaps, the only four candidates fully committed to the idea of independent political representation for the working class? No - apparently they’re the only four candidates who demand ‘Troops out now’.

The CPGB is also lending support to candidates of the rump, Stalinist Socialist Labour Party and the nationalists of Forward Wales. Never mind that these candidates have no perspective of solidarity with the Iraqi working class, never mind that they have little or nothing to say about what should happen when the troops do leave, never mind that many of them appear entirely indifferent to the fate of the Iraqi workers’ movement - as long as they use those three little words often enough then they’re okay by the CPGB.

For some reason, the CPGB has completely recalibrated its political compass. The central question - the central dividing line - in electoral terms is no longer class and labour representation, but in fact just one issue: the occupation of Iraq. And on this, the CPGB does not even base its political judgement on central questions such as candidates’ positions on solidarity with our class brothers and sisters in Iraq, or even on their attitude to the occupation as a whole (it backs, for example candidates of the Alliance for Green Socialism - an organisation which advocates UN intervention). The CPGB’s judgement is based simply on how prominently the candidates use the word ‘now’.

As a consequence of this nonsensically anti-Marxist perspective, those who keep a keen eye on the left will have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of the CPGB - a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist organisation - wholeheartedly supporting George Galloway (who has dire positions on a whole range of issues central to this election; including, from any genuine Marxist perspective, Iraq), while making propaganda against Pete Radcliff - a committed fighter with a proven record in class struggle - simply because he has objections to the use of a particular slogan.

Tina Becker wrote in the Weekly Worker of April 28 of the “pathetic advice given by Britain’s revolutionary organisations” when it comes to who to vote for it. The CPGB’s position - with is abject lack of serious class analysis - is the most pathetic of all.
Daniel Randall
email

Degenerating
Thanks so much for reprinting the photo of myself, Pete Radcliff and Bill W in last week’s Weekly Worker, under the banner ‘The leftovers’. You’ll be glad to know I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since then, and Bill has a new jacket.

Your attack on our candidate in Nottingham East really is the talk of deprived inner city areas like St Annes and Forest Fields here in Notts. I look forward to hearing from your new comrades in these areas when it comes to Robbie Rix’s weekly pocket money updates in your fast degenerating paper.
Sam Metcalf
Nottingham

Excluded
The other day I had a look at the election campaign website of Pete Radcliff, who is standing on a ‘Socialist Unity’ platform in the Nottingham East constituency (www.nottmsocialistunity.org.uk).

Whilst I share the CPGB’s assessment that the comrade’s candidacy should not be supported due to his apologist stance on the occupation of Iraq, I was impressed with the quality of the website. I therefore decided to take up its invitation for visitors to “Join our mailing list!” and submitted my email address via the form provided.

A few hours later I received an email stating: “Your request to join the Nottingham SGUC group was not approved. The moderator of each Yahoo group chooses whether to restrict membership in the group. Moderators who choose to restrict membership also choose whom to admit. Please note that this decision is final.”

I was rather taken aback by this, so I raised the issue in a posting to the UK Left Network online discussion list. Within five minutes, one of comrade Radcliff’s campaign activists, Sam Metcalf, had replied with a posting which directly linked my exclusion to the Weekly Worker’s failure to endorse his candidacy.

This behaviour seems quite extraordinarily petty. I was not seeking to infiltrate an internal discussion, but merely to join a publicly advertised campaign information mailing list of the type run by many hundreds of election candidates throughout the country. Presumably comrade Radcliff prefers communists to rely on the bourgeois media for news about his election campaign.
Steve Cooke
Stockton-on-Tees

Pragmatic IWCA
Steve Moorhouse’s criticism of the Independent Working Class Association is a typical example of how out-of-touch the CPGB is with the working class (‘No vote for IWCA’, April 28).

The IWCA’s pragmatic community activism is a much better way of galvanising our class (albeit tentatively, and in small localities), as opposed to the dogmatic and largely irrelevant activities of most ‘socialist’ parties. A party that is recognised as ‘getting things done’ will earn the trust of people, and even get them involved in working class resistance locally.

Nowhere does the IWCA say this is the be-all-and-end-all of their strategy, but a methodical way of building a self-aware, working class movement capable of challenging the status quo. Compared to the non-secular opportunism of George Galloway’s Respect, the IWCA wins hands down.
Jack Higgins
email

CPGB tailing
Steve Moorhouse’s article, as might be expected, shows a complete misunderstanding of IWCA politics.
His analysis of the philosophy and activity of the IWCA is seen completely through the lens of the CPGB’s own world view. That is, of course, their right, as it’s their paper. However, deliberate distortion based on no evidence whatsoever is not acceptable.

This is what Moorhouse does when he writes this line: “It is easy to imagine which aspects of their position are emphasised when IWCA canvassers are asked about the ‘asylum-seeker problem’ on the doorstep.” He is clearly implying that IWCA members would say that there were too many immigrants in an area, when asked about immigration. There is nothing in any IWCA material that could justify this claim and in fact the manifesto specifically makes the point that in areas where there is high immigration there should be greater government investment for the benefit of all.

Quite why Moorhouse is distorting the position of the IWCA I will leave to the readers of Weekly Worker to ponder. They may also like to reflect on the fact that since the Leninist group resurrected the name of the CPGB, they have concentrated their efforts on tailing other groups on the left rather than trying to get involved in working class politics. Those who want to make up their own mind about the IWCA and its politics can look at our website, www.iwca.info.

The only good thing about the article is when Moorhouse finishes by saying: “The IWCA’s candidate does not, therefore, merit our support in the general election.” For that at least we are grateful.
Colin Clarke
IWCA

Pap and filth
Do you not feel that all your extensive and excitable debates over who or what to vote for simply give credibility to bourgeois notions that elections are about real choice and democracy?

Elections are so obviously just circuses with crap actors, rubbish stunts and bad performances. The whole spectacle works not only to exclude anything which might question the basis of existing society, but is so nauseatingly dull as to deliberately put people off ‘politics’ altogether.

When one considers the aim of the socialist is the “complete abolition of the wages system” and production to meet human and social need, the oh so important debate between the parties as to which workers would pay how many pennies more or less in tax is shown to be the pathetic irrelevance it really is.

The capitalist media deliberately deny any thought or expression of a real alternative. Not through open debate, but by pumping out pap and filth to anaesthetise the general population, to immunise against any sort of political thinking, let alone socialism.

Bourgeois democracy is as much an instrument of bourgeois rule as the armed security forces. It serves to totally obscure the nature of capitalist society and capitalist rule. Real political, economic and military power and decision-making remains wholly within the capitalist class - a dictatorship exercised via the parliamentary state, unfettered and unquestioned by the working class.

The idea we can build a socialist majority by using such mechanisms will simply lead to abject accommodation to and assimilation within capitalist politics.
Andrew Northall
Northampton

English SP
Martin Aldridge of Northampton writes: “Comrades, we are above this sectarian bollocks! A party to act as vanguard for the British working class is a minimum requirement, and the first step the revolutionarily conscious element of British society can make towards a Communist Party of Europe” (Letters, April 21).

As an Irish socialist, the above criticisms of the Scottish Socialist Party reek of imperialist empirephilia. Just as socialists in Ireland struggle with their (mostly) catholic upbringing, it’s obvious the left in England has to work on their social conditioning. If the working class feel they prefer independence, then so what! English socialists would be better off building their own English Socialist Party than playing with daft projects like Respect.
John O’Neill
email

Life is shit
If Dominic Smith lived on the same estate as I did, and have done for the last 26 years, his attitude to drugs and to young people’s attitudes to them might change (Letters, April 28).

I have no respect for Respect, but what is not a misconception in this neck of the woods are gangs of drugged up arsewipes making like a misery for the working class. Life is shit enough without them making it worse.
Ronnie Williams
email

Concrete
Stan Keable is wrong (Letters, April 28). Against Dave Spencer, he seems to be arguing that as a matter of principle existing groups should not be told to reconstitute themselves as platforms, factions or shades on entering a “multi-tendency party”.

Yet this was essentially the condition laid down for participating in the historic 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. It was also the case with the foundation of the CPGB. Both the British Socialist Party and the Communist Unity Group voluntarily dissolved. They were followed into the CPGB by a string of other, much smaller organisations, all of which agreed to dissolve.

Such question are always concrete, however. The problem with comrade Spencer’s ultimatum is obvious. While the main existing revolutionary groups have next to nothing in terms of a working class audience, he and his co-thinkers have even less. In other words, though preaching unity, we are guaranteed continued disunity in practice.
John Bridge
London

Kiwi IBT
I was rather bemused to read Alan Davis’s accusation that your organisation is supporting popular frontism by calling for a vote for Respect (‘Stalinism versus Trotskyism’, April 21).

While Alan is presumably attempting to out-left you, with the hope of chipping away a member or two, the International Bolshevik Tendency in New Zealand has something of a track record for not only supporting single-issue campaigns based on merely liberal middle class politics, but actually attempting to restrict such campaigns to those politics.

Here are two examples. First, in 1995 the French government resumed nuclear testing at Moruroa. The National Party (ie, Tory) government strongly criticised this and the whole NZ ruling class was united in opposition to the resumption of the testing, some of them even setting sail in their yachts to Tahiti to oppose it. Former Labour prime minister Mike Moore (later of WTO fame) called on New Zealanders to snub French tourists and boycott French goods. NZ became one big nationalist popular front.

At the time, NZ was involved in the imperialist intervention in Bosnia and had troops in ‘peacekeeping’ roles in a string of other countries. You would think that the duty of revolutionaries in this situation would be to intervene in the anti-testing movement to argue for anti-imperialist politics, focusing on NZ imperialism, not just the French testing. The IBT, however, got involved in Non!, the anti-testing campaign in Wellington and, as they put it in their own paper, “argued that in order to maximise Non!’s success as a broad-based united-front opposition to the tests, the platform of the group should be limited to a single and very simple demand: stop the tests at Moruroa” (The Bolshevik No7, October1995). Of course, this was also the demand of the NZ government and the entire capitalist class, so the politics of this IBT approach were, effectively, popular frontist.

The IBT argued that, as well as being restricted to the simple liberal bourgeois demand of ‘Stop the tests’, “the different groups and individuals who made up Non! Should be free to make use of an open microphone at its public events to put forward their own politics in their own name” (ibid). This happy division of labour left people free on the Non! March to carry slogans saying ‘Fuck the French!’ and ‘French scum!’

When differences arose anyway within Non!, the IBT attempted to keep this cross-class liberal campaign against the French together by moving motions that it remain a single-issue campaign. The job of Marxists, in the concrete circumstances of the anti-French wave that was sweeping all of NZ, was to argue for a focus on NZ imperialism and couple demands for an end to French testing at Moruroa with demands for an end to NZ involvement in Bosnia and everywhere else and to expose NZ imperialism’s own sordid record and interests in the Pacific. We needed to fight for an anti-imperialist movement and argue this position within anti-testing groups, not capitulate to their NZ nationalism and liberalism and vote for keeping them reduced to those crap politics.

Although once the largest section of the IBT, the NZ group went into terminal decline around the mid-90s and now is virtually defunct. It produces no publications, has only four members left and does next to nothing in terms of public work. However, its attachment to liberal middle class single-issue politics remains undiminished.

Late last year, the minuscule NZ National Front decided to have a national mobilisation in Wellington. This attracted only a couple of dozen far rightists. While the National Front is completely marginal, the liberal-left got very excited. As a result a counter-mobilisation was organised and a coalition called Multicultural Aotearoa was set up. Multiculturalism is the ideology not only of NZ middle class liberals, but also of the ruling class. It is the official ideology of the NZ capitalist state.

Yet the IBT - this time reappearing from near-oblivion - signed up to Multicultural Aotearoa and joined forces with the liberals in opposing arguments by the Anti-Capitalist Alliance that the coalition needed to go beyond liberalism and take up issues which exposed the policies of the state and the Labour government. ACA comrades argued, for instance, that open borders should be one of the demands for the anti-racist march.
The IBT opposed this, arguing for a single-issue focus on opposing the NF. In fact, the whole NZ ruling class is opposed to the NF, so this is popular front politics. A leading IBTer argued with us that we were being ultra-left and sectarian by going along to a single-issue campaign group and trying to change the focus of it!

The Multicultural Aotearoa single focus on the NF - although the ACA did manage to get some reference to opposition to immigration controls on the group’s leaflet - not only reinforced what is already the dominant bourgeois ideology in NZ (multiculturalism), but also played into the hands of the Labour Party, who are perfectly happy condemning the NF, while being busy tightening immigration controls and detaining refugees in holding camps.

Next time Alan tries to out-left the CPGB he might remember that modern communications make it very difficult for tiny sects like his to argue one thing in one part of the world while practising something quite different in another part of it.
Phil Duncan
email

Good company
For what it’s worth, I should point out that Alan Davis, in his haste to enlist Trotsky in his support over the question of popular fronts, manages to mis-cite the reference he is quoting.

The quotation beginning “The question of questions at present is the popular front ...” is not from an essay titled ‘The POUM and the popular front’. It is rather from one entitled ‘The Dutch section and the International’, reproduced in Trotsky’s Writings of 1935-36 (Pathfinder Press).

Trotsky used to generally chide people about such inattention to detail. But since the IBT, and their Spartacist political parents, have a history of misquoting this fragment and thereby distorting the actual meaning of the article it comes from, with a cavalier disregard for truth that would make Stalin proud, I suppose it is too much to expect for them to give an accurate citation.

Those who wish to know what Trotsky was actually driving at in this article could do worse than look it up themselves, in conjunction with reading my 1998 article, ‘Trotskyism, the united front and the popular front: against class collaboration and sterile sectarianism’, which is available at http://members.aol.com/revolutiontruth/popfront.htm. This decisively debunks the Spartacist thesis that the task of Marxists, confronted with a genuine popular front, is to refuse to support even the ‘working class’ component of it and generally avoid being ‘polluted’ by it like the plague. In fact, the Trotskyist movement in its classical period, with Trotsky’s approval, not only supported workers’ parties in popular fronts, but also engaged in outright entrism: eg, into the Spanish Socialist Party, when it was one of the main partners in a popular front government in 1936-39.

The IBT’s feeble piece of falsification is to justify its cult-like political isolationism that has nothing in common with the practice of the earlier Trotskyist movement whose views they claim to be upholding. Not that this has any relevance to the debate around Respect, which has no ‘bourgeois’ component in any case, and in fact quite openly poses itself as a new ‘labour party’ (with a small L) and a working class-centred alternative to New Labour.

The IBT is in good company using mangled and falsified quotations to debate with other distorters of social reality such as the CPGB, whose spurious accusations of popular frontism against Respect are just a smokescreen to hide their refusal to call, concretely, for the defeat of their own ruling class at the hands of those resisting in Iraq. Whereas Respect, unlike any popular front in history, is known for open support for armed resistance to its own ruling class.
Ian Donovan
London

SWP pole
Leading Socialist Workers Party comrade Chris Harman stresses the importance of building “an organisation that fights on every front if there is ever going to be a serious challenge to ruling class power” (Socialist Review May). This challenge, he continues, “can’t be done with a party like the Labour Party or a social democratic sort, or for that matter simply by an electoral coalition like Respect. It requires a different sort of party, active within the Respect coalition as within every other front of resistance, but also aware that there is a wider and, at the end of the day, more important struggle. This is the sort of party ‘of a new sort’ that Lenin set out to build in Russia ...”

Harman is right in saying that the building of a revolutionary party “remains a necessary goal in Britain today”. However, do the SWP comrades advance this by burying revolutionary principles inside Respect? At Respect’s October 2004 conference, the SWP majority bloc voted down the CPGB’s motion calling for a women’s right to have an abortion - as early as possible, as late as necessary. It voted against any motion which even hinted at ‘secularism’. It voted against the principle that workers’ representative should only take an average skilled worker’s wage. It voted against open borders, even though in the ‘What the Socialist Workers Party stands for’ column it claims: “We oppose everything which turns workers from one country against those from other countries. We oppose all immigration controls.”

Surely the revolutionary party is advanced by communists working within Respect as communists? As Jack Conrad states, “Our road lies from revolutionary principles to becoming a majority, not from being a majority to revolutionary principles” (Weekly Worker March 17).

Harman in an earlier article argues that, whilst the revolutionary left internationally was small at the time of Seattle, it was important nevertheless that there was a “revolutionary pole of attraction” within the movement to counter reformist or autonomist arguments (International Socialism autumn 2004). Is it not just as important today that the SWP acts as the “revolutionary pole of attraction” in Respect?

Harman argues that “Respect has been important because registering the level of leftwing disgust with Blair in itself can draw round a left pole of attraction very large numbers of people who are confused as to which way to turn” (Socialist Review May). Surely, if SWP comrades openly advanced revolutionary politics, then this would not only eliminate some of the confusion inside Respect, but also help attract people to the necessary revolutionary party?
Michelle Euston
East London

Print this page