Weekly Worker 582 Thursday June 23 2005

Letters

Irish struggle

I have been following with interest Liam O Ruairc’s postscript on Provisional Sinn Féin and the armed struggle, and reluctantly conclude his analysis seems all too correct. However, I take issue with his devaluation of the process which gave rise to the movement and the political conclusions of those working class lads and lasses who took up arms and armed struggle against British imperialism and waged that campaign until the ceasefire.

Of course “people joined or supported the Provisional movement because they suffered from discrimination and repression”, but they went on from that to see that repression and their resistance in the context of a world revolutionary struggle (Weekly Worker June 16). The same was true of many elements of the black struggle in the USA, the Palestinian struggle in the Middle East and the struggle of workers here in Britain. Discrimination and oppression are the main entry points into revolutionary struggle, armed struggle included.

Why does Liam think the young workers of occupied Ulster resisting the B Specials, the British murder gangs, the army and the orange ultras did not go on from “defencism” to setting their struggle not only in the context of Connolly but also the world revolution, as we would have seen it at that time? The truth is, most did - you only had to see the giant, internationalist wall murals to realise that, never mind listening to or reading what people like Bobby Sands and his comrades had to say. Liam is devaluing the revolutionary class and revolutionary socialist republicanism which was the bedrock of the Provisional IRA.

I entirely disagree that the Price sisters were “the exception rather than the rule”. My experience, particularly through the 70s and 80s, at least as far as Ulster was concerned, is entirely to the contrary. It’s for this reason that the current abandonment of that perspective and that selfless struggle is so bitter and, yes, utterly disappointing.

Having said that, it is not time to throw the baby out with the bathwater or start rewriting the history of the Provos as somehow futile or doomed. I have heard far too much of that about the miners’ strike of 84-85, and seen our history and experience bent and distorted by our one-time comrades, to witness it again before our very eyes and while we are still alive about events almost as recent just over the water.

I would hope there is still time for the revolutionary socialist republicans within the Provisional movement, and particularly the IRA which had many of the best elements, to regroup and reform, before feelings of utter defeat and futility do set in.

David Douglass
Doncaster

SSP smears

The Scottish Socialist Party is in desperate need of an enema. The CPGB’s open letter to the party will, however, contribute little to seeing that we get one. The named individuals (Williamson, Truman and Carroll) should all be severely disciplined, with at least two of them (Williamson and Carroll) considered for expulsion. However, such a mini-purge comes nowhere near close to being what is required. If their crimes against the CPGB were all they were accused of, they can rest assured that they will get off scot-free. This for a variety of reasons.

First, as Mark Fischer himself explained, these individuals have been systematically alleging the CPGB is a front for MI5 for years - as long as I can remember. Why should the party take their latest smears as cause for immediate investigation when the CPGB has not made a fuss previously?

Secondly, the Weekly Worker’s coverage of the SSP has been pretty dire for years - seemingly calculated to alienate absolutely everyone, with no serious attempt made to differentiate between an enormous number of contrasting positions. Given this state of affairs, you have made it pretty much impossible for the handful of us who would want to help you, such as myself. Most members will ignore the absence of evidence of your alleged relationship with the state: ‘You deserve everything you get’ is how many comrades will respond.

Thirdly, these allegations against you are, as Mark points out, too ridiculous to be taken seriously. There are, however, other smears Carroll, Williamson, Truman have been responsible for in recent months - smears of a far, far more serious nature. It is these that the Weekly Worker should be concentrating on. Our party’s national convenor, Colin Fox, and his predecessor, Tommy Sheridan, might be more inclined to take the side of the CPGB against Carroll and co if you had taken their side when they needed it. It is also actually rather amusing that you attempt to enlist the help not only of Colin and Tommy but of Frances Curran and Carolyn Leckie. The CPGB really ought to have been shouting from the rooftops for several months now that these two individuals have been working hand in glove with Truman, Carroll and Williamson in smearing our national convenor and his predecessor in the most despicable way possible.

The party’s press officer denied me communication with the membership via the email list because I complained about his anti-democratic shenanigans in censoring me for exposing the consistent and unapologetic scabbing of his friend, Williamson. This, however, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Leave aside his breaking his own code of conduct (by allowing his friend, Scottish Republican Socialist Movement member and animal rights spokesperson John Patrick, to describe me as “a British arsehole”; or Truman’s referring to me as “an obnoxious idiot”; or his previously referring to me as “a fuckwit”). Truman’s real crime is allowing the party’s email forums to become an instrument for sleaze merchants (such as Carroll, Williamson and his SRSM co-thinkers) to inject poison into the party, helping to reduce it to a shadow of what it was a year ago. Far more important than his smears against me (or the CPGB) is the way he allowed others to smear Tommy Sheridan and Colin Fox.

For reasons that have yet to be satisfactorily explained, it struck Jim Carroll as a good idea to accuse Tommy Sheridan of being clinically insane. Carroll then went on to appeal to the party’s leadership to find some means of depriving Tommy Sheridan of the oxygen of publicity - for the good of his own mental health, of course. How precisely McCombes was supposed to get Tommy to do a disappearing act was never spelt out.

How did the SSP’s press officer respond to Carroll’s smear about Tommy’s mental health? Did he kick him off the list? No. Did he place him under immediate moderation? No. Did he threaten to censor all his subsequent posts, unless he agreed never to repeat this smear? No. Truman is, thus, as culpable as Carroll for the fact that days went by before this ludicrous smear ran out of steam.

Then we had Carroll’s still more offensive smear against Tommy Sheridan, the one for which he ought never to be forgiven. Tommy’s crimes (those for which he had to become persona non grata within the party, as far as Carroll was concerned) are comparable, alleged Carroll, to those committed by Gerry Healy, the notorious guru of the Workers Revolutionary Party, who was expelled amid an exposé of systematic sexual abuse of female party members over a period of several years. Again, despicably, Truman sat back while Carroll whipped the party’s membership, via the internal email list, into a disgusting witch-hunt against one of our MSPs.

Jim Carroll and Eddie Truman think that because this smear campaign was constrained within the confines of the party, neither of them have a case to answer. Not so. The pair of them should be called to account by the entire party membership. Carroll has always claimed that an (as yet unidentified) member of the party’s executive encouraged him into launching this smear campaign. If Carroll was put up to this, then he should be forced to name that individual.

Any member of the party’s executive who now claims that Tommy Sheridan has ever been guilty of having committed sexual crimes would be culpable of a sinister cover-up of such crimes. Those members (such as Jim Carroll) who have been throwing around these smears without a shred of evidence should be drummed out of the party. And those who have acted as protectors for these slime balls (such as party press officer Eddie Truman) should be immediately sacked.

Members of the party’s executive who have been sniping at our former national convenor from behind Rupert Murdoch’s coat-tails (Frances Curran and Alan McCombes) should be given their marching orders. Those MSPs who want to advance their careers in the SSP by painting one of our valued MSP as a pathological liar really need to start looking for another career.

Tom Delargy
Glasgow

Pious bunch

Smeared or not, the CPGB are painting themselves as a pious bunch - unable to allow dissent and different voices in the left. I hope the SSP members that your open letter has been sent to treat it with the contempt it deserves. “Keeping the workers’ movement clean” sounds to me more like building ‘socialism’ from Mark Fischer down. A real workers’ movement, like the SSP, will listen to all voices.

Neil Scott
email

AWL routine

It is fast becoming the case that my week seems incomplete without having to put right some distortion of my position and that of my organisation expounded in the letters page of the Weekly Worker. My thanks, then, to comrade Billy Bond for keeping my weekly routine ticking over nicely (Letters, June 16).

Refreshingly, Billy’s opening salvo isn’t a distortion, but actually perfectly true. He says that I “reject as un-Marxist the slogan ‘British troops out now’ in relationship to Iraq”. Yep, absolutely right. The slogan is nonsense. It is not the presence of “British” troops that is the problem - it’s the presence of troops at all, of any nationality. Actually it’s the whole framework of global capitalism that’s the problem, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to sum up our attitude to that in a slogan.

What Billy is wrong about is his assertion that I think we should limit ourselves to using just one slogan about Iraq. Far from it - I simply think that ‘Solidarity with Iraqi workers’ better sums up a positive, practical, Marxist orientation to the situation than using ‘Troops out now’ as one’s primary or sole slogan. But it is in the closing sentence of Billy’s letter that he really finds his form. Apparently, we in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty “prefer Oona King to George Galloway, call [our]selves Zionists and promote Kautsky’s rotten idea of ‘ultra-imperialism’”.

With regard to the first of these interesting assertions, if you’re asking whether we prefer to vote for a candidate whose organisation has a structural link to the labour movement or for a candidate whose organisation is a popular-frontist communalist lash-up with no link whatsoever - neither structural nor ideological - to class struggle, then yes; we prefer Oona King to George Galloway. The second assertion is simply a lie - we do not “call ourselves Zionists”. Show me it in writing, Billy. Show me where “we” (the AWL, collectively, as a whole organisation) “call [our]selves Zionists”.

Finally, it is true that the AWL has challenged the left consensus on imperialism and attempted to thrash out ways of developing and advancing Marxist theory on the question as imperialism itself changes. Whether this is tantamount to “promoting”, wholesale, Kautsky’s theories is another matter. But why let that get in the way of a good, healthy rant at the AWL, eh, Billy?

Until next week ...

Daniel Randall
AWL

All bollocks

I’ve been seeing Daniel Randall’s name, and thoughts, a little too often for my liking in recent issues. My displeasure is born out of a brief exchange about left unity that I had with him on the AWL website last year. I didn’t conclude this argument, but would like to finish it now.

I wrote to the AWL expressing my frustration at the pedantic posturings of the ‘voices’ of socialism. My bone of contention being that the constant backbiting and insistence on ideological purity are self defeating of any chance of left unity. To illustrate my point I wrote: “NUM members in the 1984-85 strike were not ideologically pure, but clearly showed the power of working class unity. A little more unity from others, and who knows ... ?”

The response I got was from Daniel Randall, the AWL’s own working class hero, whose battle-hardened opinions were formed from his experience in decades of struggle. He wrote: “On the miners’ strike, I think you’re confusing unity of the labour movement with unity of left organisations. We’re Marxists - we have a certain way of analysing the world and a certain set of political ideas based on our Marxism. We must also win workers to this perspective - arguing against the politics of the bourgeoisie but also against the mistaken politics of some left groups where necessary.”

At the time I declined to reply. I thought it to be a nonsense spewed from the mouth of a juvenile, middle class wanker, well versed in theory but low on practice. However, this is what I’d have said if I could have been bothered. That’s all bollocks. Marxist theory is just that - a ‘theoretical’ attempt to resolve working class subservience and subjugation. You can have as many united socialist groups as you like, but if you haven’t got the working class it’s pointless. Marxism is purposeless without the working class. The whole point is that this is a class issue, a class struggle, a class war - the class is the working class, and that class is the labour movement. To quote from the Class War Federation: “We must unite on the common basis of what we have in common - our working class background and needs”.

Above all the CWF believes that politics cannot be separated from life - and life from politics. We reject the missionary/righteous so-called ‘revolutionary’ left. Our politics must be fulfilling and relevant to our everyday lives. Working class people must take responsibility for their progressive revolutionary politics - fly-by-night middle class radicals have been the bane of our movement for as long as the working class has existed.

Watcyn Youd
email

Foetus stress

Anne Mc Shane writes: “But the issue is one of rights, and the current practice of ascribing social qualities to a foetus means that women are denied their right to choose” (‘Science and social choices’, February 10).

Not so. Abortion is not illegal, I don’t see how they are being denied this ‘right’. If women are informed that a foetus may be sentient she may indeed exercise her right to choose not to abort. Then again she may still choose to abort - it is down to the person concerned.

As one of the speakers at the meeting being reported commented, animals feel pain, so why not foetuses? In fact medical evidence has shown that during late gestation foetuses do show response to stimuli: rapid eye movement has been detected, they go through patterns of sleep and wakefulness, and they respond to their mother’s moods. Some children born after 9/11 showed symptoms of stress due to what their mothers experienced in the presence of the atrocity.

Liz Hoskings
email

Choice attacked

Regarding your article on Italy, what has happened there in relation to fertility rights is happening on a wider scale (‘Victory for pope’, June 16). There has been a plethora of attacks by the Bush administration on reproductive rights. These include attacks on late abortions; instigating the global gag rule, which denies US foreign assistance to organisations which fund abortion services; ‘abstinence only’ education; redefining the legal status of the foetus; and now some pharmacists are refusing to sell the morning-after pill and even the contraceptive pill due to ‘moral’ and/or religious objections (ably backed by Pharmacists for Life).

What next on the rightwing agenda? Roe v Wade? I am sure the religious fundamentalists would love to see the destruction of that piece of law. And then last year there were more sexist and offensive offerings courtesy of the Vatican being ‘concerned’ about women not “fulfilling their maternal vocation”. A good, stiff dose of religious morality, which enables women to ‘know thy place’ with the words ‘Kinder, Kirche, Küche’ ringing in their ears.

These constant attacks on reproductive rights will erode choice, but that is what the moralists want. An attempt to roll back the gains won over many years to ensure that women will be well and truly under the thumb. It is important for socialists and feminists to fight for reproductive rights and that includes choice. To deny choice is to deny liberation for women.

Louise Whittle
email

New Chartism

Britain needs a new Chartist movement to challenge the unjust election system and results. Only 22% of eligible electors voted Labour, but Labour won 55% of the seats - securing a majority of 67. We need a campaign of Chartist-style protests to demand a genuinely democratic electoral and parliamentary system.

How dare Tony Blair lecture president Mugabe about unfair elections, when our own election has produced such patently unfair and unrepresentative results? Labour cannot claim a genuine victory - let alone a mandate for its policies. It won only 36% of votes cast, which is the lowest ever share of the vote for a wining party. Its share of the vote is less than the 39% of electors who did not vote.

This is not democracy. It is a form of political corruption that echoes the rotten boroughs of 19th century England. The undemocratic electoral and parliamentary system has become intolerable and must be reformed.

The first-past-the-post electoral system is rigged in favour of the two main parties. Millions are denied political representation. Their votes don’t count. It cannot be right that a minority party like Labour can win a substantial majority of seats. With this result, Britain’s voting system looks increasing like that of a tin-pot tyranny.

The time has come for a new Chartist movement to secure a democratic and representative parliamentary and electoral system. If the government will not grant us genuine democracy, people power and non-violent civil disobedience will be necessary. The methods of the Chartists and suffragettes are ethically and politically justified.

Peter Tatchell
London

Transitional

On the issue of the Communist Party draft programme, there’s nothing incomplete about the demand to nationalise threatened workplaces under workers’ control (Letters, June 16). It’s actually a transitional demand, for the capitalist state, if it were to (temporarily) nationalise threatened industries, would scarcely turn their control over to the workers. Likewise, a scenario in which workers are already in control of an industry would be existing within a dual-power scenario, with a revolution very close at hand. It’s not a reformist scheme to save industries under capitalism, but actually a call for the workers to take social and state power.

As for Michael Jackson, that there are those who doubt his sanity, feel that he’s lived a comfy life or that his music has much to be desired are scarcely reasons to advocate, directly or indirectly, that he be sent to prison. As far as his living with “equal[s]” in prison, prisoners are, for the most part, the dredges of society, for the system produces them. If Len Trotter feels that Michael ought to be spending his time with working class people, then perhaps he should write to him urging that he do so. But alas, working class people don’t have the criminal mentality, so prison would not have been a very proletarianising experience for him.

Michael Little
Seattle

Go on, admit it

I asked, 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” (Letters, April 28)?

Seven issues later there has been no reply. Can I assume that this silence means that Peter Manson and his fellow CPGB comrades finally accept that Lenin was correct to explicitly oppose any kind of political alliance with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries and yet at the very same time enter into a temporary, military/technical alliance with them against Kornilov?

And therefore that the CPGB’s statement that every military alliance is necessarily also a political alliance is wrong? Or perhaps they are saying that Lenin was wrong? Not that this is necessarily a crime, but it would mean that their previous claiming of Lenin’s political heritage on this question was also incorrect.

Goodbye note

In reply to John Bridge, yes, I do think the idea that the Communist Party should be made up of politically conscious communists is a principle - or a “taboo” as the CPGB’s head spin-doctor puts it (Letters, June 2).

My previous letter that Bridge is replying to had been motivated not simply by the Weekly Worker’s printing of Bash’s article, but rather by the lack of a rebuttal, which appeared to imply some degree of political support for Bash’s reformism. That suspicion of the CPGB’s political support for Bash’s ideas is confirmed by Bridge’s very comradely defence of Bash’s politics - “... whether or not he [Bash] writes ‘claptrap’, again I [Bridge] think not”. It would seem that whatever differences may exist between Bridge and Bash are secondary ones between friendly fellow-travellers. I have no interest in joining their anti-communist ramblings through the swamp of centrist/reformist politics.

I’ve only been following your organisation and its journal closely for just under a year but it has become abundantly clear to me in that short time that you actually have very little to do with communism, despite your formal name and occasional radical rhetoric. I therefore intend to give you much less attention in future as there are some much more interesting, and politically serious, Trotskyist groups on the British left who my time will be far better spent engaging with. You will no doubt write me off as having a “sect mentality” or something similar, but coming from a right-centrist group like the CPGB that is probably a compliment.

John Watson
email

Jehovah’s Witnesses

What on earth have you people got against the truth? Your report on the June 4 CPGB aggregate repeats past faults of how the ‘Marxist’ left deals with reality: first, try to be ‘Mystic Megs’ and, secondly, be the worst ‘Mystic Megs’ there can be. How exactly do those ‘iron rules of history’ and that ‘basic Marxist ABC’ tell us the Socialist Workers Party will “explode”?

Your misunderstanding of the SWP’s rank and file remind me of past misunderstanding of the Labour Party’s rank and file. Do you remember their chosen tactic in the ‘fight’ against Tony Blair? Yep, the old nine-minute standing ovation with moist eyes and quivering lip.

If the SWP leadership say they want Respect to say what the public wants, it’s because they are pandering to their own rank and file! I’ve seen recruits asking what the SWP is all about and being told to join first and then find out later. Ordinary people I know are wary of the SWP not because of any point over leftwing politics, but over the dodgy, extremely slavish attitudes they have towards their bosses in the party. Don’t you know that most people’s aversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses is not based on any theological distinction?

The long-term approach of the SWP has been to relentlessly make out ordinary people are more leftwing than they really are. They want to belong to a club and delude themselves their club is very similar to ‘the working class’ and to ‘muslims’. In the past the old Militant’s leadership could talk to me about Ireland but not the recruits trying to fit in to their new club. I cannot see into the future, but like Scottish Militant and the SSP, the ‘rank and file’ may and wish to belong to something a bit more ‘popular’ and leave behind dogmatic ‘Marxism’.

About your tactic towards Jeremy Corbyn. Isn’t it oh so obvious that it’s irrelevant when it comes to ‘the class’ (sic), but has served to inoculate leftists to be much more supportive of him?

Bob Harding
Norwich

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