Weekly Worker 580 Thursday June 9 2005

Letters

AWL and Iraq
Nick Rogers is too modest by half (Letters, June 2). His achievement in persuading the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (including both Pete Radcliff and Martin ‘a little bit Zionist’ Thomas) to support “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British and all other troops from Iraq” at the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform meeting in January is an oratorical feat worthy of Demosthenes or Edmund Burke.

Alas, Nick has been somewhat economical with the truth, as there is another, more mundane explanation. It was only after the AWL motion had been bombed out that they decided to support Nick’s amendment deleting my motion. And what did the AWL motion, which best describes their real views on the question, as opposed to tactical considerations, state? “Calls for troops out should be consequential to an overall orientation towards working class solidarity.” Clearly this is not quite the ‘troops out now’ position Nick would have us believe.

Nor is Nick correct in his assertion that the primary difference between Nick’s and my successful motion was over the question of a critique of various reactionary forces in Iraq. The objections the AWL had to my motion were:

• it supported the right of the Iraqi people to “physically resist” the imperialist invasion;
• it supported “all genuine working class and socialist/communist forces in Iraq”, particularly the Worker-communist Party and Federation of Workers Councils/Union of Unemployed in Iraq;
• it condemned the attempts of the imperialists “to promote the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions as the sole legitimate and legal ‘union’” and called upon the IFTU and Iraqi Communist Party to withdraw from the US’s puppet Allawi government;
• it condemned the elections because, far from leading to the creation of even a bourgeois democratic society, they were helping to divide Iraq on sectarian and confessional lines and were aimed at “setting the seal on the organised theft and robbery of Iraq’s resources”.
  

By making calls for a withdrawal of imperialist troops from Iraq conditional on the activity of working class organisations in Iraq, the AWL is engaging in an act of supreme political cowardice. Our support for such organisations starts from the premise that imperialism has no progressive role and that its occupying forces should be withdrawn immediately.

However, there is nothing new in the AWL’s abject surrender to imperialism and national chauvinism. One has only to look at their role in opposing the academic boycott of Israeli universities by the AUT, when they openly aligned themselves with rightwing and Zionist forces, who argued that the union should have nothing to do with international solidarity.

The AWL, in supporting ‘dialogue’ with Israeli universities that are complicit with the occupation of Palestinian lands, betrayed not only the Palestinians but also their erstwhile comrades in the SADP such as Sue Blackwell. Sue was subject to a vicious attack by the rightwing press (Daily Mail, Evening Standard, etc) and yet the AWL saw nothing. Martin Thomas even claimed that she had been given open support by The Guardian and the liberal press. Sue was a comrade of the AWL in the Socialist Alliance and SADP. She has received a number of death threats and I have personally listened to one particularly vicious threat to maim and kill her. The AWL’s scabbing on comrades like Sue, to whom they offered no support or solidarity, is a disgraceful act which puts them beyond the pale.

The two Israeli institutions which the AWL was so keen to maintain ‘dialogue’ with included Bar Ilan, a religious university which helped establish and validate the College of Judea and Samaria in the far-right Ariel settlement on the West Bank, and Haifa University, which only two weeks ago held a conference on the ‘demographic problem’ in Israel (ie, too many Arabs).

The AWL claim to support a two-state position on Palestine, one with which I disagree. However, anyone who isn’t either blind or deaf would understand that in order to achieve this aim pressure needs to be put on the Israeli state. AWL forswear any such pressure because in reality their main concern is support of that state. The AWL should be treated as the lepers of the left.

By the way, I agree with Nick that the CPGB were wrong not to endorse Jeremy Corbyn MP in the general election, given that he has taken a principled position throughout parliament on a whole series of issues, including asylum-seekers and refugees. However, turning back to the Labour Party is not a solution.
Tony Greenstein
email

School student
Well, gee, Enso, thanks. As a school student, I always appreciate a bit of extra-curricular tuition, so your enlightening little insights were really helpful (Letters, June 2). No - I’m lying. They weren’t. Comrade Enso White talks about “basic Marxist principle”, but, as far as I can see, although his contribution to this debate is not very Marxist, it is very, very basic.

Enso starts with the slogan, ‘The main enemy is at home’, takes it out of its proper context and then makes a ridiculous fetish of it, eventually concluding that ‘British troops out now’ is an appropriate sloganistic summary of a revolutionary attitude to Iraq.

There are a number of ways one could approach this tired, reactionary position. Firstly, one might query why he thinks ‘British troops out now’ is an appropriate slogan at all. This is inverted nationalism, surely? What about American troops? Troops of other nationalities? ‘Get our boys home then it’ll all be okay’? Is that it, Enso? The inverted nationalist furrow is one that Enso seems determined to plough.
He goes on: “The main enemy of the working class in Britain is not Saddam Hussein or Muqtada al Sadr. It is the ruling class in Britain.” Yeah, okay. But what about the Iraqi working class? Muqtada al-Sadr certainly numbers amongst their ‘main enemies’, of whom there are a great many. But they don’t matter, right? Because we’re only about opposing ‘our’ ruling class and getting ‘our’ troops out of Iraq.

And does Enso really think that the best way of opposing ‘our’ ruling class is simply by demanding that they stop their most recent military adventure? (Even if we do demand that they stop it now)? We’re not in the business of giving advice to imperialists and they’re not in the business of listening to us. Marxist slogans only make sense when they are conducive to some kind of action: ‘British troops out now’ just isn’t.

The AWL’s main slogan - ‘Solidarity with Iraqi workers’ - implies an approach that seeks to build practical links with a movement actually fighting the imperialist occupation on a day-to-day basis; the only movement that can force the troops out and replace them with a secular, democratic alternative.
The starting point in terms of formulating a Marxist attitude to any situation is the struggles of the working class. One might also ask, therefore, how exactly Enso’s position bears any relation to an approach based on solidarity and the linking of the struggles of British workers with those of our Iraqi comrades?

No - the troops aren’t playing a progressive role. That’s precisely why our approach must be based primarily on making links with those fighting them on a working class basis. Making ‘British troops out now’ the sloganistic summary of your policy implies, at best, indifference to the struggles of the Iraqi labour movement and, at worst, the most horrendous kind of ‘light the blue touch paper and run’ inverted nationalism. Either way, it’s a perspective both British and Iraqi workers could do without, and Marxist it certainly ain’t.
Daniel Randall
AWL

Reactionary ‘no’
So the French ‘non’ is a victory for the ‘left’ (‘Build on French success’, June 2)? I seem to remember that you used to know better, but it seems you’ve now joined the idiot chorus of protectionists, utopian socialists, Le Pen, anti-Turkish islamophobes and various Stalinists in their thoroughly reactionary attempt to roll back the film of history.

In the Netherlands it was even clearer: whenever the ‘left’ (and greens) have won ‘victories’ against capitalist European integration, the real winners have been the far right.

Maybe it’s being in Respect that has addled your brains and blunted your class consciousness?
Jim Denham
AWL

Pedagogic
What a lot of reformist hogwash the letter from Mike Calvert is (Weekly Worker June 2). Such rightwing nonsense I have not seen in ages.

Communists are clear: they can have no truck whatever with the reformist Labour Party. But that was in the days when it was reformist. Now it is an out and out bourgeois party. It is no longer a bourgeois workers’ party in any shape or form at all and as such it is the job of communists and Marxists to articulate the perspective of the out and out destruction of that party.

This is why Mike Calvert, and the Socialist Party even, are utterly wrong. There can be no revolution based on the alliance of people like Calvert with the CPGB. It is a rotten bloc.

Mike talks hogwash when he draws parallels between the consciousness of the working class and the Labour Party. The bottom line is if people have socialist ideas explained pedagogically to them they can change the world.

Mike is clinging to the outmoded entrist nonsense of the 1980s. It is time this rubbish was junked.
There can be no doubt that there is no place for socialists within the Labour Party. All socialists must be within Respect.
David Simpson
email

IBT principles
Phil Duncan from New Zealand criticises the role of International Bolshevik Tendency comrades in Non!, a 1995 united front formed in New Zealand to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific (Weekly Worker May 19). Phil suggests that “the approach of the IBT was the same one pioneered by the US Socialist Workers Party in relation to the Vietnam war - unite as broad a section of society as possible on the basis of a single slogan”.

It is indeed true that the SWP described its National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) against the Vietnam war as a ‘single-issue’ coalition. The SWP/US worked hard to entice the ‘progressive’ left wing of the bourgeois Democratic Party to speak at NPAC events. But in order to do so, it had to bury the Marxist political positions it claimed to stand on. The SWP/US also had to ensure that no other participants had the opportunity to raise anything that might offend the sensibilities of the liberal imperialists and so insisted that no political demands could be advanced by NPAC that went beyond calling for the withdrawal of US troops. The Stop the War Coalition organised by the British Socialist Workers Party in opposition to the attack on Iraq operated in a similar fashion.

Non! was organised on the basis of a single demand, but, unlike NPAC or the STWC, all participants were free to put forward their own political views. IBT comrades in New Zealand used the opportunity afforded by the mass rally organised by Non! to argue for our revolutionary programme - including the unconditional military defence of North Korea and the other deformed workers’ states against imperialism. This was only possible because Non! was organised on a basis that was entirely different from NPAC or the STWC, which were not united fronts but popular-frontist formations in which communist politics were excluded in pursuit of bourgeois respectability, aka ‘the broadest possible’ mobilisations.

Comrade Duncan’s proposal boils down to building propaganda blocs with other groups in which all agree in advance on a common, if limited, programme or set of demands. Revolutionaries decline to build the illusion that a bloc of disparate forces can hammer out an adequate programme. Instead we carry out the tactic of the united front as developed by the revolutionary Comintern under Lenin and Trotsky. Rather than seeking common formulations with reformists, we seek to unite the largest number of people in action to struggle for issues of vital concern to the workers’ movement (like, for example, smashing the National Front). Within such blocs for common action we defend the right of all participants to put forward their own distinctive views, and to raise whatever criticisms of their bloc partners they deem appropriate.

In the May 26 Weekly Worker, Enso White, who we presume represents the thinking of the top leadership of the CPGB, criticised our policy of flat opposition to any candidates running on a cross-class (ie, popular front) electoral slate. Comrade White characterises as a “dishonest attack” our reference to the “CPGB’s scandalous policy of voting for the Movement for Democratic Change - the party of Zimbabwe’s white settler capitalists”. He seems to think that because much of the founding membership of the MDC originated in “the bowels of the Zimbabwean trade union movement” it is not fair to label it as a tool of the white elites. Yet, as we noted in 1917 No23, “While the MDC membership is overwhelmingly black and working class, its leadership is effectively controlled by white commercial farmers and business people.” This is confirmed by the anti-working-class, IMF-style austerity programme adopted by the MDC. The CPGB is understandably chagrined to be reminded that in 2000 they were calling for votes to this outfit, but it hardly makes us “dishonest” for mentioning it.

Comrade White also objects to my observation that “A revolutionary organisation might decide to send members into a mass reformist workers’ party participating in a popular front if there appeared to be significant recruitment opportunities”. He sees this as evidence of a “narrow, mean-minded and short-termist approach”. For our part we make no secret of the fact that, like Trotsky, we wish to destroy popular-frontist formations as rapidly as possible by splitting them into their class components. If the CPGB leadership prefers to develop long-term relationships with the MDC, Respect and similar multi-class formations we are happy to leave you to it.

From the outset we refused any political support to Respect. The CPGB’s record is rather less consistent. At its March 2004 aggregate meeting the leadership pledged that “the CPGB will work to ensure the biggest possible vote for Respect” (Weekly Worker March 25 2004). At the March aggregate this year, the CPGB dropped its policy of blanket support for Respect (which it now acknowledges to be popular-frontist) in favour of a “vote to working class anti-war candidates”. This is, at least in words, a step toward our position, yet the CPGB leaders still balk at recognising that the issue of independence from the bourgeoisie is a matter of principle, and that consequently, organisational independence from the exploiters is a precondition for communists to extend any sort of electoral support to candidates claiming to stand for the interests of the working class.

Who can disagree with Comrade White’s advocacy of “complete tactical flexibility”? But, for revolutionaries, voting for bourgeois parties like the MDC, or for reformist workers’ parties running on a joint ticket with capitalists, is not a matter of tactics - it is a question of principle. This is why we do not endorse the decision of the Bolshevik Party prior to World War I to vote for the candidates of the bourgeois liberal Cadet party. At the same time we recognise that this mistake derived from a flawed strategic perspective - the presumption that after the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, Russia would have to undergo a period of capitalist economic development before socialist revolution could be placed on the agenda. This perspective was jettisoned with Lenin’s famous April theses in 1917 which represented a fundamental political reorientation on the question of the feasibility of a workers’ revolution and, therefore, on the attitude to take toward the bourgeois provisional government. From that point forward, the Bolsheviks rejected any political/electoral support to capitalist politicians, and explicitly repudiated the policy of conditional support to the new government that had been advocated by Stalin and the other ‘old Bolsheviks’ after the February revolution.

I would like to extend an invitation to Comrade White and all interested Weekly Worker readers to discuss these questions further with us at our forthcoming public meeting ‘Respect: pro-religion, anti-abortion popular-frontism - for a revolutionary perspective!’ on Saturday July 9 during the SWP’s ‘Marxism’ event.
Alan Davis
IBT

Republicanism
Philip Ferguson (Letters, May 26) takes me up on some points, but I fear we may mean different things by the terminology.

It is not clear what he means by “globalisation theory” which he thinks I accept. Capitalism has been battering down obstacles to its progress since at least the days of the Communist manifesto, and Marxists have always held that the working class is an international class. Philip says he agrees with me “in general” that “the political independence of the working class needs to be articulated on a global scale”, but then takes refuge in the unevenness of development to stress the national context of struggles.

I did not say that nation-states were about to disappear. Unfortunately, they are still very much around. However, the concept of independence or ‘national liberation’ appears increasingly hollow, even from the standpoint of its limited bourgeois objectives, when facing the free movement of capital. It is only the workers who are imprisoned by national boundaries. For example, I do not see how it will help the Palestinian masses to have their ‘own’ state.

I had initially commented on the articles by Liam O Ruairc and Philip on the evolution of the republican movement. Liam now puts forward a view that interested me a good deal in the early 80s - that republicanism is not simply nationalism, but contains a ‘lower orders’ dimension stretching back to the Fenians. He argues that a movement for socialism must work alongside this tradition. Britain also had a ‘lower orders’ movement going back to Chartism and before, but there is no significant movement that can reasonably place its roots in that tradition.

But where is the movement that he wants to work alongside? Occasionally, the rhetoric might embrace both nationalism and the ghosts of the Fenians, but the reality is that republicanism is represented overwhelmingly by the Adams leadership. If there are any faint strands of the Fenian spirit left in Sinn Féin, they do not find programmatic expression.

Meanwhile, Sean MacGabhain insists, against Liam, that Sinn Féin has not accepted the unionist veto. True, perhaps, but they appear to be stuck with it (or, more accurately, a British veto hiding behind the unionists). They, despite their own instincts, are caught up in a constitutional framework, which they can only challenge in words, while they wait for the ‘nationalist’ community to outnumber the loyalists.

The only alternative road out of the ghetto is to appeal to workers on the basis of class rather than identity. This is almost unthinkable for the republican movement, and difficult for those socialists who see a (bourgeois) republic as a means to achieve socialism.
Mike Martin
Sheffield

Competition
Comrades Phil Kent and Suzano Tavistock ask a number of questions in response to my article on sport (Letters, June 2).

Phil Kent asks: “Do not better ideas replace less good ideas in competitive processes like science and government?” Yes, they do. “Is all progress going to stop under communism?” Of course not. “What will people do who are suffering from life-threatening illnesses? Will they fight them? Presumably not, if the competitive spirit is only a characteristic of class society.” Yes, they would fight. But here is where the questioning becomes misleading. Nowhere in my article did I suggest that “the competitive spirit is only a characteristic of class society”.

Phil is not alone in putting words into my mouth. Suzano Tavistock tells us that “communism can do away with the alienation, commercialism and psychotic egoism associated with capitalism”, but goes on to ask, “does it abolish competition as such?” No, it does not, but once again, I made no such claim.
I have looked back at my article and accept that I did not make myself as clear as I could have. I predicted that in a communist society our leisure activities would not be based upon competition. Phil Kent makes the point that sports can require a great deal of cooperation. True, but their dominant feature is competition. Likewise, under capitalism, competition in general is a dominant feature within society. However, if we are going to have a discussion about competition in general, not just regarding sport and leisure, then we have to accept that competition can play both a positive and negative role.

The examples Phil highlights are the progressive role competition can play in the development of ideas and the “need to compete with nature”. I have no quarrel concerning the development of ideas. However, when we talk about competition with nature, we must be careful to be clear. It is important to remember that humanity is an integral and key component of nature - there is no simple duality between the two. Competition is of course central to Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is also clear that there is a great deal of senseless competition in the way humanity currently relates to the rest of nature. The continued hunting and poaching of endangered species, in order that the rich may satisfy their desire to possess, impacts negatively not just on those species but also on nature and humanity itself. Agriculture under capitalism is also laden with examples.

Returning to the issue of sport and how we recreate ourselves in our leisure (or ‘free’) time, I feel it is clear that the dominant role of competition in this sphere no longer serves humanity - rather profit and the interests of capital. George Orwell once remarked that “sport is war minus the shooting”. In my opinion it is no more “utopian” to predict the withering away of competitive sport in a communist society than it is to foretell the demise of war within that very same society.
Dave Isaacson
Nailsworth

Degradation
Given Jem Jones’s willingness to concede that Star wars is mindless, reactionary rubbish, it seems churlish to take issue with his review (‘Attempt at mythology’, June 2).

However, bearing in mind Gramsci’s observation that hegemony consists of force plus consent, I fail to see how an embarrassed, nostalgic giggle can ever be an appropriate response to the cultural degradation so perfectly epitomised by Lukács and his ilk. The reduction of the viewer to the level of gormless, consuming spectator is far more pernicious than any overt reactionary political content could ever be (as it happens, the political content of Star wars does seem pretty unsavoury, although I am not sure this matters much; the virulently fascistic Celine remains one of the great writers of the last century).

The exploitation of the worker does not begin and end at the factory gate, but continues at the burger bar, the multiplex and on the domestic sofa.
Paul Sutton
email

Drivel
So you’ve lost your low-level sleeper(s) inside the Socialist Workers Party and now Mark Fischer comes up with this drivel (‘Will John Rees liquidate the SWP for the sake of Respect?’, June 2). There is nothing here that smacks of any notion at all of what is going on inside the SWP. This is a very poor article.
Moin
email

SWP liquidation
I found Mark Fischer’s article most interesting. One question the SWP should ask itself is this: what will happen to Respect once George Galloway rejoins the Labour Party when Gordon Brown becomes leader? That question should concentrate the thoughts of SWP members wonderfully.

It seems as though, to paraphrase Trotsky, the SWP is “tobogganing towards a catastrophe with their eyes closed”. The SWP is the last of the three main Trotskyist groups in Britain not to have split or imploded. Militant split into Socialist Appeal and Militant Labour/Socialist Party in 1991 and the Workers Revolutionary Party imploded in 1985. The SWP liquidating itself like Peter Taaffe’s Scottish Militant Labour therefore seems like an accurate analogy - and John Rees is effectively liquidating the SWP.
That will be a fitting end to the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain today.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Fenland advice
In the letter entitled ‘Advice, please’, John Smithee asks: “Have any readers of the Weekly Worker any advice as to what I should do in this one-party Tory state that is my home town?” (June 2).

Two things come to mind, John. First, stop voting Tory (as you did at the last election); and, second, stop advocating the wholesale stock transfer of council housing (as you did in the pages of Fenland Today).
Dave Edwards
email

Past battles
I think John Smithee should start a Fenland Workers Party - another ‘one-man-and-his-dog’ socialist sect is just what is needed. Nothing wrong with another harmless diversion - it may take our minds off of the pantomime going on within the SWP/Muslim Brotherhood.

From some of the letters published in your organ over the past months it is clear to see that the revolutionary left has not only lost its way, but many have lost the plot and are simply fighting past battles over and over again within a bubble of their own making. Does anyone else realise that we are on a roller-coaster to irrelevance?
Bryn Jones
email

Normal man
The BNP is not full of racist thugs, as you claim. I am a normal married man with children and grandchildren, but I do not want my country taken over by multinational ethnics who could well stay in their own countries and help to make them like ours instead of coming to the UK. Their countries consist of many millions and yet a small minority make out they want to come to the UK under the pretext that they are being persecuted by their ‘own’. Why don’t all the other millions who stay in their own lands come then?

You don’t see the Japanese being called racist because they forbid inter-country mixing. It’s Japan for the Japanese, France for the French, Germany for the Germans and it should be England for the English. Let’s kick the so-called scroungers out - then we wouldn’t have to build more houses and our schools and hospitals would have plenty of space. That would leave housing, etc for our own people.
Norman Sutcliffe

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