Weekly Worker 597 Thursday October 20 2005

Letters

Unequal Welsh

Bob Davies has written an interesting article concerning the question of minority languages on a planet increasingly dominated by a handful of languages, the foremost of which is English (‘Minority languages and communists’, October 6).

Bob’s main focus was, however, far narrower than this global context in which he situated his remarks and was centred upon the plight of the Welsh language in the British state. In this reply I shall limit myself to a discussion of the latter alone.

Borrowing heavily from GA Williams’s discussion of the historical circumstances that saw the Anglicisation of large parts of Wales in the 19th century, Bob rejects the mythology of much of the Welsh nationalist movement that this was the result of English coercion. This proves that when considering Welsh history it is very sensible indeed to borrow from GA Williams. Unfortunately Bob does not improve on Williams’s treatment of the question and when he ventures to make a judgement of his own falls into the trap of repeating what is perhaps the crudest of the nationalist myths, when he tells us that Welsh is one of “the oldest languages in Britain”. In fact modern Welsh appeared rather later than English.

It is true that the language from which Welsh descends, Brythonic, was spoken long before anything resembling English. But Welsh itself is a far more recent development and was standardised only after English had undergone a similar process. The point here is that languages come into being, thrive or fail in close relation to the specific societies from which they arise. This has meant that particular languages have been seen by the bourgeoisie as one of the central ideological tools by which their class establishes its hegemony. In general this has led to the bourgeoisie of specific states adopting, and therefore standardising for ease of communication, a single language.

Welsh is not such a language but rather developed from the tongue of a social group, the embryonic Welsh feudal class, which was unable to construct a state of its own. Welsh remains a language without a state in a society that long ago relegated national states to the status of historic curiosities without benefit to those imprisoned within their borders.

It is an irony of history, though Bob appears not to have noticed, that, having used the English language to enforce its rule from Bristol to Bengal and from Cardiff to Canada, the British boss class is no longer the sole proprietor of the language which, to some considerable degree, is now the de facto language of the bourgeoisie on a world scale and, far more importantly for us, of considerable sections of the subaltern classes. More confident than ever before of its class rule (such confidence is but prelude to its fall) and finding the confines of the national state ever more restricting, along with the requirement of such a ‘nation-state’ to promote a single language of rule, the British boss class can easily afford to promote minority languages as a part of its commitment to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism being the name given to the policy of divide and rule in the sphere of culture.

Even the historically late arriving Welsh nationalists of Plaid Cymru are aware of this and, as a token of their commitment to a capitalist Europe, are quite prepared to take subsidies from the EU every bit as much as they will take handouts from Westminster. They do require an independent state to further develop their vision of a Welsh-speaking Wales. If that vision demands that Plaid Cymru speak a ‘social democratic’ language in order to win Labourite votes, then so be it. But genuine socialists should know that, once in office, Plaid are as willing as any other bourgeois party to enforce cuts, as long as the Welsh-medium education sector is untouched. The point is that they need state sponsorship for their programme to be concretised and in no sphere is this more true than in their cultural politics, especially in terms of language.

Bob is correct to argue that the language question cannot be abstracted from social questions. His arguments that the Anglicisation of Welsh-speaking areas can only be halted by the socialisation of the economy is, however, quite wrong-headed. He is correct that housing and jobs should be provided to all in such areas if the drift of young, often working class, Welsh speakers is to be halted. Where he is wrong is in assuming that even if their needs are met locally young Welsh speakers will not move to other areas in any case and then become assimilated.

At bottom the increased mobility of the workforce today guarantees that Welsh speakers will be ever more assimilated into the English-speaking majority. The complex nature of the economic base of society cannot but force labour to comply to its needs and one such need is a common medium of communication. This guarantees that at best in the future Welsh will be no more than a second language.

It is because they sense this that the Welsh language lobby and Plaid Cymru must clamour for the state - any state - to enact measures not only to protect but also to promote the Welsh language. In part their demands are from a communist viewpoint wholly supportable. As Bob writes, it is a basic democratic right that Welsh be treated as an official language just as English is and that there should be no exceptions to this for private business and within the legal system, as at present. But the demand of the Welsh language lobby that Welsh and English should be equal, which Bob echoes and suggests is an expression of extreme democracy, is mere utopianism.

In fact Bob does understand that Welsh and English are not and cannot be equal when he notes “the enormous preponderance and weight of English”. This, Bob tells us, necessitates positive support of the Welsh language. In other words there must be state-backed discrimination in favour of Welsh speakers. There is here a contradiction between Bob’s support for an abstract extreme democracy and the reality of two unequal languages. In fact Bob’s extremely democratic advocacy of the equality of Welsh is little more than an attempt to tail the Welsh language movement in the hope of recruiting some of its more extreme left elements to extreme democracy.

In reality Welsh and English are not and cannot be equal. The one is both the language of rule for a number of bourgeois states and the tongue of millions, whilst the other is spoken by a small, declining population and requires the support of the state to guarantee its continued existence. There can be no question of two such different languages being equal.

And it is just as abstract to describe the Marxist programme as extreme democracy. The Marxist programme is concerned with workers’ democracy and not democracy in general, however extreme.

Mike Pearn
Cardiff

Left and Ireland

Some small points of history about the British left and Ireland. Both comrade Liam O Ruairc, in his review of Alan Woods’ book (Weekly Worker October 13) and comrade Jack Conrad in his draft theses (September 29), especially at point 15, appear to me to oversimplify this issue and write out of history a political struggle which helped shape the modern British far left. What I have to say is unfortunately from memory, since I no longer have the archive of the relevant documents.

In the first place, the intervention of the Fourth International (USFI) and its British section, the International Marxist Group, was in no way limited to condemning the sending of troops to Ireland in 1969. IMG comrades argued, in my view correctly, that the principal responsibility of the British left was to build a movement for British withdrawal, and they persisted doggedly in this policy through a succession of attempts: first in the Irish Solidarity Campaign, then the Anti-Internment League, then the Troops Out Movement and finally (following entry into the Labour Party from the early 80s) the Labour Committee on Ireland.

A part of the difficulty experienced (reflected in the succession of different vehicles) was the need for a broad campaign movement in Britain to have at least some support from Provisional Sinn Féin, given this tendency’s ascendancy in the Six Counties, and the Provisionals’ tactical twists and turns in relation to this question. As to the Irish Republican Socialist Party/Irish National Liberation Army, the IMG leadership at the time of the IRSP/INLA split from the Provisionals, on the advice both of the Irish USFI supporters and of Bob Purdie and others active in the solidarity movement, took the view that the military discipline and effectiveness of INLA volunteers was lower than that of the Provisional IRA (even allowing for the smaller sizes of the organisations) and that the tendency would therefore be likely to prove ephemeral.

At least the second half of this judgment has proved to be wrong. But the IMG’s decision to attempt to pursue relations mainly with elements of the left in Sinn Féin, as opposed to the IRSP, was made within the unequivocal framework of willingness to solidarise with those carrying on the armed struggle and of seeking a British defeat.

Secondly, as comrade O Ruairc hints, the USFI/IMG was by no means unique in its general approach to the Irish struggle in the 1970s, and the Revolutionary Communist Group, Revolutionary Communist Party and The Leninist/CPGB positions which comrade O Ruairc refers to were in a sense late outliers of an earlier political struggle. The USFI/IMG launched a furious polemic against the pro-troops positions of the International Socialists (later SWP) and Militant and the effective abstentionism on the question of the Socialist Labour League/Workers Revolutionary Party in the immediate aftermath of 1969.

In the IS/SWP the question was one of the central issues animating the opposition factions in the early 1970s, which were driven out to form Workers’ Fight (much later Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), Workers Power and the RCG (later RCG and RCP). The Irish issue formed, albeit weakly, part of the Thornett faction’s critique of the Healy leadership of the WRP, and the Workers’ Socialist League which resulted from the split adopted clear positions against the role of the British imperialism in Ireland and was consistently active in the solidarity campaigns. Matgamna’s turn on Ireland towards the AWL’s present positions, in fact, was the central animating factor in the 1986 split which separated the Thornett grouping from what became the AWL.

The British far left was thus divided in the 1970s between a majority which indeed had the economist vices comrade Conrad describes and a substantial minority which opposed to these a struggle in Britain for withdrawal from Ireland and against partition.

Thirdly, I do not think (in relation to comrade Conrad’s judgment on the Irish co-thinkers of the British left) that the activities of the Irish USFI affiliates - the Revolutionary Marxist Group/Movement for a Socialist Republic; later People’s Democracy/Socialist Democracy - can be characterised in the terms comrade Conrad used. Though this is a small current, these comrades always have placed, and still do place, the national question at the forefront of their politics. Their difference with the republican movement is that they have persistently argued since the early 1970s that, as John McAnulty put it in 2004, “Our belief was, and is, that only a mass mobilisation of the working class could possibly confront imperialism successfully. The history of the armed groups and their political representatives would appear to confirm our view”
(www.socialistdemocracy.org/Debate/DebateReplyToLetterFromIRSP.html).

There are many things that can justifiably be said about the political bankruptcy of the USFI. Economism on the Irish struggle is not one of them.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Islamophobe Lenin

To accuse socialists like Ian Donovan who vote against socialism of crossing class lines is hardly preposterous - especially when Ian describes the offending CPGB motions to the Respect conference as being “motherhood and apple pie”, which I think must mean that he finds them absolutely unobjectionable (Letters, October 13). It isn’t as if there were other socialist motions which clashed with ours, where socialists would have to choose one or the other.

Why vote rightwing at a leftwing conference unless you want to move the organisation to the right? If that’s your agenda why not say so and explain why you think it is necessary, rather than making absurd claims as to our motives, which are self-evidently to move Respect to the left.

It is beyond me, Ian, how you can dredge up an excuse not to vote for a motion in favour of open borders. Nor can I understand your claim that to vote against the motion is not crossing class lines. Open borders are in the interest of the working class, are they not? And capitalist-controlled state borders are in the interest of the capitalist class, which is what you are voting for.

Your position is absurd and can only be construed as a deliberate effort on your part to aid the SWP in trying to ensure that genuine socialist viewpoints go unheard within Respect (while the socialist “tinsel” is retained, of course). It is the duty of all socialists to openly make propaganda and not to hide our views on whatever we believe to be the working class interest - whether or not this is misrepresented as “islamophobia”, as Ian does over Iraq.

The slogan, ‘For the IRA, against the British army’, cannot be mechanically transposed to read, ‘For the Iraqi resistance, against the coalition armies’. The democratic and class basis of the Iraqi resistance (content unspecified) and the IRA (a specific organisation) are very different. The IRA looked back to Wolfe Tone and James Connolly, contained secularists, socialists and communists and had a base that was both sociologically and politically working class. We engaged positively with it and tried to turn its cadre towards communist politics, but our support was limited to the democratic and anti-imperialist content of its programme.

The democratic and anti-imperialist content of much of the Iraqi resistance is questionable, to say the least. The programme of several islamist groupings, both sunni and shia, is based not on the fight for self-determination, but for a particular form of theocracy, and these groups will target with violence anyone who happens to oppose that aim. One moment it could be the occupation forces, the next followers of a rival sect. In the case of sunni groups linked to al Qa’eda it could be shia worshippers at a mosque (although Ian conveniently likes to pretend that al Qa’eda is ‘not really’ part of the resistance or that the likes of Zarqawi are imperialist provocateurs to a man). These groups are programmatically opposed to the interests of the working class and they could just as easily strike up an anti-working class deal with the Americans as make war on them.

The Guardian a week or so ago spoke to a women’s rights activist in Iraq. She carried a pistol to protect herself against the islamists but she was also for throwing the Americans out - a position she described as “patriotic”. I don’t agree with patriotism - I’m an internationalist - but nonetheless her views are the sort we should relate to positively. Our opposition to political islamists is not because they are muslims, but because they are dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries who would slaughter the working class just as they did in Iran.

Like Lenin, we recognise the “need to combat pan-islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc” (‘Preliminary draft thesis on national and colonial questions’, June 5 1920). No doubt Ian would regard this as islamophobia and would have refused to vote for any of his resolutions at the 2nd Congress of the Third International.

Again like Lenin, we are revolutionary defeatists. When he called for the defeat of the tsar, he was not hoping for a German, or for that matter an Anglo-French, victory, but for the defeat of all of them at the hands their own working classes. Russia was primarily the responsibility of those living in Russia.

We too would welcome the defeat of our own ruling class. This is the extent of our ‘support’ for the Iraqi resistance in its present form.

Phil Kent
Haringey

Scabbing

Comrade Ian Donovan is rather ill-advised to start accusing others in the workers’ movement of hysteria (Letters, October 13). The comrade’s evidence that the CPGB is in a frenzy of “sectarianism” is that our Phil Kent used the term “scabbing” in relation to his refusal to vote for principled motions at Respect conference. For Ian, scabbing must involve something objective like “crossing an actual class line. For instance … a picket line”.

Now, Ian is well aware that in polemical exchanges between communists, words can be used in a vivid, broad-brushstroke manner to highlight key points. I assume that this - rather than a clinical diagnosis - is why he labels Phil’s letter as “lunatic” and “indeed, insane”.

However, let’s look a little closer. Ian writes that we are branding as ‘scabs’ “anyone who doesn’t vote for” motions sponsored by us at the forthcoming Respect conference. Well no, actually, Ian.

There will be a minority of delegates who vote against them because they genuinely do not agree with them. They are wrong, but sincere. But what are we to make of the majority of comrades in the hall, people who will vote against these motions despite professing to actually believe in them? Frankly, these comrades are scabbing - not simply against their own socialist beliefs, but also against basic principles of the workers’ movement itself.

Mark Fischer
North London

Slight modification

Zoe Elwin’s letter only serves as an index as to the depth of islamophobia that the CPGB’s programmatic defaults have induced in its members and periphery (Weekly Worker October 13).

Concerning the debate between myself and various CPGB comrades (most recently Phil Kent) over whether or not to give support to the Iraqi resistance against the US-British colonial occupation, Zoe writes: “Ian ‘critically’ supports any terrorist atrocity that is or that he can delude himself might be directed against the imperialist occupation. He regards any condemnation of such terrorism or the programme behind it as ‘islamophobia’, no matter what the religion of the victims, or presumably the perpetrators.”

This is dangerous nonsense. Both in my writings when a member of the CPGB and consistently since leaving it, I have always condemned any action that deliberately targets civilians. I challenge Zoe or anyone else in or around the CPGB to produce one quotation when I have ever condoned such attacks - you won’t be able to. On the contrary, from 9/11 to Bali, from the Ashura atrocity of early 2004 to London 7/7, and many more, I have always condemned deliberate killing of civilians.

This dispute is about our attitude to direct conflicts between Iraq insurgents on the ground and the coalition armed forces. The CPGB refuses to make the simple statement, which is obligatory for any genuine socialist, that in such conflicts between part of the Iraqi people, in struggle with our ‘own’ government, it is on the side of that section of the Iraqi people. Unconditionally.

This is why the CPGB’s talk of how it is ‘defeatist’ towards its own government in Iraq is double-talk. Confronted with an armed conflict between insurgents in Najaf, Fallujah or wherever and the British army, it cannot unambiguously come out with a simple statement that in that concrete armed conflict it is on the side of the insurgents, and hopes to see them prevail over ‘our’ armed forces. On the contrary, in such conditions it sternly points out that such insurgents deserve no solidarity, tarring them as ‘reactionary anti-imperialists’. This is ‘defeatist’ in the abstract, but opposed to ‘its’ government being defeated in the concrete - defeated by the forces they are actually fighting. That is what this debate is about.

Regarding motions at the upcoming Reaspect conference, I note that the CPGB has now submitted a resolution against all immigration controls. In a slight modification to the tactic of refusing to vote for CPGB motions, I would now urge all comrades to boycott all the CPGB’s motions - either abstain or vote against - except for this one, which I will be supporting and urging comrades to support.

I note that this is an issue of some concrete importance in the real world - unlike all the other CPGB motions, which are coded attacks on muslims or George Galloway from a position deriving directly or indirectly from islamophobia. Whereas the issue of immigration controls is a controversial issue of principle that preceded the divisions on the left over islamophobia that led to the birth of Respect. It rather impinges on future debates within Respect (or any other working class party project that may arise in the future) about revolutionary, internationalist politics versus national reformism.

The purpose of my position on the CPGB’s motions is to protest and draw a line against the reactionary aspects of the CPGB’s critique of Respect - centrally its semi-AWLish islamophobia and anti-Gallowayism. But there is no need for anti-imperialists who are not in agreement with the SWP’s ‘old Labour’ stageist view of how to build a party to cut off their noses to spite their faces by applying this too mechanically.

Ian Donovan
South London

SWP other world

I am deeply distressed, yet not surprised, by the anti-Marxian posturing outlined in your article on the Manchester Respect conference (‘Making Marxism superfluous: John Rees Prostrates himself’, October 13).

The parasitical tentacles of impressionism, opportunism and philistinism appear to have thoroughly strangled the supposed central purpose of the SWP. They have subverted themselves into the vile depths of the popular frontist methodology; effectively bowing down to the dominant ruling class hegemony of our time.

As Marxists we mustn’t be afraid to forward political demands which may go against the grain of current working class consciousness. In fact it is our objective and our duty to do so. If we forever subordinate ourselves to ‘the movement’ then, ultimately, ‘the movement’ will become frustrated and consciousness will take a backwards step even further. This has been illustrated clearly by the failure of the anti-war movement to ‘stop the war’, since the perspective of a mass general strike was not raised as a key tactic by the coalition.

Thus, it is critical that the banner of socialism is raised, now more than ever! If we fail to raise it consistently then, as Marxists, we have accepted defeat.

The SWP characterised Russia as state capitalist. So they not only don’t understand Marxism - they also fail to understand the nature of capitalism. However, they sound like they know a great deal about ‘other worldism’!

Michael Wainwright
email

Eh?

Readers may be amused by an example of the creative use of punctuation from those famously reputable journalists on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s fortnightly, Solidarity. In its ‘Looking left’ column of September 22, we find a little gem of an item titled - appropriately enough, as it turns out - “Eh?”.

The snippet tells us that the Weekly Worker’s front-page headline of that week - referring to the political fallout in the United States post-Hurricane Katrina - starkly warns: “Military dictatorship in the offing”. Intrigued - slightly appalled, actually - I looked up the offending issue online.

In fact, the headline reads: “Military dictatorship in the offing?” (Weekly Worker September 15). That is, it’s a question. Turning then to the offending article, I find it is actually penned by Martin Schreader - a US resident and a member/supporter of political organisations based in that country with no explicit fraternal political links to the CPGB. This comrade does indeed see the possibility of military dictatorship in the US, but what is it that leads the AWL to believe that this is the view of the CPGB?

Dom Selby
Middlesborough

Abortion

Liz Hoskings reminds me of other erstwhile Sparts (or Spartoids, in her case) who are occasionally featured in our columns (Letters, October 13). When they shed the sectarian shell of this or that organisational affiliation, we see just how brittle that shrill revolutionism was in the first place.

For her part, comrade Hoskings combines her condemnation of our criticisms of Respect with a shameful support for thoroughly reactionary religious anti-abortion organisations that entrap desperate young women and pressurise them to go though unwanted pregnancies.

Instructively, she retains features of her training in Trotskyist economism, however. For instance, she takes the CPGB to task for giving importance to a “diversion” like abortion and not concentrating on proper “socialist issues” - that is, “childcare, maternity leave and work-time flexibility”. As if a woman’s most basic democratic right to full control over her own fertility is not a “socialist issue”!

On this issue comrade Hoskins is not simply a reactionary. She is a clumsily dishonest one. It is true that the demand for “free abortion and contraception on demand” rightly occupies an important place in our programme as one of the most basic we advance in our section on women. And alongside it, Liz, are calls for “24-hour crèches and kindergartens to facilitate [women’s] full participation in social life outside the home”; “high quality canteens … laundry and house cleaning services to be undertaken by the state” as a step towards the full “socialisation of housework”; “fully paid maternity leave three months before and six months after giving birth (the partner to be provided with six months paternity leave)”; “either parent” to have “paid leave” to “look after six children” and a “maximum six-hour working day for all nursing mothers” (CPGB Draft programme p16).

Our call for free access to abortion has to be taken in the context of these basic demands and, indeed, as an integral part of our minimum programme as a whole. The point being that, as our class fights for and achieves aspects of this programme, the position of women and all oppressed groups in society is transformed. The desperate economic and social conditions that can push many women towards the drastic solution of abortion will be alleviated and the relations between the sexes transformed.

Lastly, comrade Hoskings wags a finger at the left for not supporting the likes of “a pro-life group” on the south coast that provides “an excellent care service for young mothers” - then displays such a moronic lack of self-awareness that she admonishes us that we “have lost all principle and don’t care any longer who you join up with”!

Tom Simpson
Plymouth

Like Bruce

Even if one does not believe life begins at conception, the seed of the man and women have joined together and a life is going to result. Abortion is murder most foul of innocent, defenceless life. There are people willing to adopt babies. Abortion does not benefit women. Girls can feel pressure to have an abortion and, having had it, regret.

However, as a Connollyite socialist like Bruce Kent, I would never vote for a rightwing person even if they were anti-abortion.

Andrew Harvey
Carlisle

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