Weekly Worker 603 Thursday December 1 2005

Letters

No abstention

Enso White’s letter contains the usual dross you will find from ‘imperialist economists’ (November 24). Didn’t Lenin roundly denounce and expose these kinds of people almost 100 years ago?

Some comrades seem wilfully blind to the tactic of permanent revolution as well. White snidely talks of raising money to send weapons to the resistance. Well, first I think it is important to point out that the mass resistance movement in Iraq does not need weapons - it already has plenty!

Socialists support the resistance critically but unconditionally because if we only supported a ‘pure’, working class, socialist resistance in a semi-colonial country we could be waiting a very long time. But the goal of socialists must be for the working class in Iraq to get stuck into the resistance, to join it in principled action against the occupation forces and to provide the kind of leadership that is required. Anyone who says, ‘All the resistance is composed of islamic fundamentalists’ is preaching a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the working class elements and socialists abstain from the resistance then it will inevitably be controlled and organised by the hard-line islamist elements.

Even if most of the resistance is islamic, to think that they are all fundamentalists is a critical error - the kind the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty makes with gleeful abandon. Of course, workers and socialists should work alongside muslims, all the better to convince them that their already existing leadership is wrong and that the leadership of revolutionaries is what the resistance needs.

What should socialists be saying and agitating for in Iraq now? No to sectarian attacks; organise working class resistance (strikes, blockades); arm the working class; a constituent assembly; self-determination for the Kurds; for women’s rights; for the immediate withdrawal of all occupation forces; and for joint committees of struggle in each community, region and workplace that can create a national leadership for the resistance.

These are the kinds of demands that can break muslim workers and youth from their reactionary leadership. Sitting on the sidelines and shaking our heads helps no one apart from the reactionary elements. Politics abhors a vacuum - the resistance movement will either be led by revolutionaries or reactionaries. I know which one I prefer!

Simon Hardye
Leeds

Fairly hysterical

Being denounced by Enso White (who?) as a “renegade” and a “laughing stock” for continuing to argue for my positions in the pages of the Weekly Worker, having left the CPGB after its own islamophobic mini-witch-hunt last year, is rather like being savaged by a dead sheep. Having faced far worse abuse from the likes of the Spartacist League and Sean Matgamna, I can only say that I regard it as an honour when people of similar calibre lose their rag at my political arguments and start issuing excommunications for ‘renegacy’.

What is interesting, however, is why he sees fit to indulge in this kind of ‘drawing of the line’ against my politics in such a public manner. In my experience, when sectarian hacks resort to such excommunications, it is a sure sign of fear on their part. Fear that they are losing the political argument.

There really is little in comrade White’s letter that is not dealt with in my most recent reply to Phil Kent in the same issue. In reply to many of the points he makes on the allegedly ‘popular front’ nature of Respect, I refer him and readers to that letter to save repetition.

Comrade White complains bitterly, but disingenuously, that the political charge of ‘islamophobia’ from people with my views is “a disgusting slur, designed to discredit, intimidate and silence opponents” - and even bizarrely postulates that I would like to see the CPGB prosecuted under the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill! This kind of self-pitying, self-indulgent nonsense is itself a fairly hysterical attempt to place particular political criticisms beyond the pale of debate, and is therefore an example of exactly the kind of thing comrade White is falsely accusing me of. It is also a characteristic whinge of the pro-occupation, liberal pseudo-left - the likes of CPGB favourite Peter Tatchell, or ‘Harry’s Place’ - against Respect and the genuinely anti-imperialist left.

There is very little new in Enso’s rant - except perhaps his bizarre attempt to excuse the CPGB’s refusal to support the Iraqi resistance by reference to the Falklands war in 1982 and the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91. A child in a kindergarten ought to be able to tell the difference between these two situations and Iraq today. In 1982 Argentina was not occupied by British troops. In 1991, Iraq was not occupied by the then ‘allies’. If there is no occupation, then there can be no resistance to support. This truly is an Alice in Wonderland analogy - trying to equate apples and oranges. A far better analogy is Kosova in 1999, when the CPGB supported the Kosova Liberation Army in its armed struggle against the Serbian occupation of Kosova, even though the KLA openly allied itself with Nato. In this I believe they were correct - because there was an absolutely crucial question of national oppression involved. As there is today in Iraq.

And if support for the KLA was a matter of principle in 1999, despite its alliance with Nato imperialism - the main reactionary force on the planet by the way (obviously socialists at the same time should intransigently oppose the KLA’s Nato allies and their war) - then it is equally a matter of principle to advocate support for mass-based armed resistance in Iraq today.

Ian Donovan
South London

Concessions

Ian Donovan continues to shout abuse at the CPGB, but his letter last week effectively concedes we are right on a number of issues (November 24).

First, he says that the Muslim Association of Britain is a “petty bourgeois formation … which is excluded from the British ruling class”. Although comrade Donovan thinks it is “something of an exaggeration” to describe MAB as bourgeois, he does not contest my statement that “its leaders are capitalists and businessmen and its political positions are unmistakably bourgeois” (Letters, November 17).

Either way, despite its semi-detached role, MAB is one of the main non-working class organisations exercising a distinct pull to the right inside Respect - which is what defines it as a popular front. It is true that Respect’s platform is “pro-working class” in a narrow sense, but the same could be said of previous popular fronts, which also put forward a series of trade union-type demands.

What was generally significant about them was what they left out of their platform in order to accommodate their right wing, however numerically insignificant. The most recent example that has come to light in Respect is the deliberate and disgraceful omission of gay rights from the general election manifesto at the insistence of George Galloway, who feared (correctly) that non-working class elements in the mosque and organisations such as MAB might influence muslim voters to withhold support if LGBT rights were included.

Second, comrade Donovan concedes that it is a “legitimate criticism” (albeit simultaneously “irrelevant”!) to say that Respect is “not upfront enough” (his words) in calling for the defeat of ‘our own’ imperialists in Iraq. This was something else ‘overlooked’ in the general election manifesto. He comments: “… it is hardly new for the left to play down ‘difficult’ positions and tend to substitute somewhat economic-centred agitation for them”. Yes, it is known as opportunism and is particularly pronounced within a popular front.

In effect, comrade Donovan is acknowledging that his previous assertion - that Respect has “fought for support for armed resistance to its own imperialist ruling class in a colonial war” (Letters, November 10) - was a “gross exaggeration”, as I pointed out. Like myself, comrade Donovan has been unable to find “a single sentence amongst Respect campaigning material or official public statements that urges support for, or victory to, the Iraqi resistance - or calls for the occupation to be defeated militarily” (November 17).

While ‘victory to the resistance’ is the formal position of comrade Donovan and the Socialist Workers Party, it is actually far from ideal, in that it fails to differentiate between the various components of the resistance. But here too comrade Donovan has been forced to give ground. He writes: “There is no categorical imperative that one must support every single small grouping that claims to be ‘opposing’ imperialism. There is, however, a duty to support all genuinely mass-based struggles, those that have a real democratic content.”

There are signs that we are getting somewhere here. Previously comrade Donovan had insisted that it was indeed a “categorical imperative” to support all elements of the resistance, and excused his own failure to back Zarqawi’s al Qa’eda grouping by claiming that it was “not really” part of it. Now he admits, however grudgingly, that Zarqawi does “take the occasional pot shot” at the Americans (in fact his forces have been responsible for a series of spectacular bombings, targeting not only military installations, but hotels and compounds containing foreigners deemed to be part of the occupation).

Of course, there can be no question of supporting Zarqawi, since his anti-imperialism is completely bereft of “real democratic content”, being driven by his viciously sectarian, anti-shia, anti-western, anti-working class version of islamism. However, comrade Donovan’s emphasis on size cannot be correct. For example, in current circumstances a new revolutionary communist grouping that came into existence in Iraq would necessarily be “small”. On the other hand, there are undoubtedly “mass-based” anti-occupation organisations that are driven by the most reactionary, anti-working class programmes.

In fact it seems to me that Zarqawi must enjoy a degree of mass support. Virtually every day his forces strike - either against the occupation or in the form of some indiscriminate terrorist outrage against shias. Usually his cadres are killed in the process, but there seems to be any number of young men ready to step into their shoes. Zarqawi also appears to have huge reserves of explosives and weaponry and the US forces are simply unable to defeat him.

In other words, comrade Donovan’s implied claim that Zarqawi’s group is “small” and without support does not stand up to examination. Nor does the claim that he, or al Qa’eda as a whole, is engaged in “pro-imperialist” provocations. They are reactionary anti-imperialists and should be opposed for that reason.

Nevertheless, it is excellent that comrade Donovan, despite his CPGB-phobia, has finally accepted that it is correct to differentiate between the various components of the resistance. We look forward to his admission that such differentiation should be based primarily on class, not size.

Peter Manson
South London

Pull the plug

Trying to win Respect to revolutionary politics is an impossibility, as all the groups who remain in it and provide it with political cover will find out to their cost. The machinery and funding of Respect is firmly in the hands of those who will do anything for an alliance with muslim organisations and anti-socialists.

The evidence is so overwhelming that it’s time to pull the plug on involvement with Respect now.

Alex Nichols
email

Independent?

Guildford Respect contested the Friary and St Nicholas by-election on November 24. The candidate was CPGB supporter Tom May, who stood as independent Respect and gained 43 votes (2.5%) in a seat where the Liberal Democrats topped the poll and the Conservatives came second.

We waged a very hasty campaign and we managed to get not just the Respect members (seven or eight of us in this Surrey town), but also some other independent socialists to help us. However, we were handicapped in a number of ways. For example, we were unable to get through the bureaucracy of Respect and so were not able to put the party name on the ballot paper.

We explained this in our leaflet as being due to time constraints. But, to be more candid, we could put it down to either administrative incompetence or political indifference to fighting elections in a place like Guildford. One or two comrades were even more cynical.

Ioanna Ioannou, Tom May
Guildford Respect

SSP lessons

Many thanks for a good set of reports on the Respect conference (November 24).

I attended the launch conference of Respect on behalf of the Scottish Socialist Party and in my report I mentioned Ken Loach’s speech, in which he said the launch was either a very significant day for the socialist movement or another false dawn. I added that history will decide which is correct and that the SSP should be fraternal in its approach as long as Respect stays south of the border.

Since then Respect has had some successes, in particular George Galloway’s excellent victory in Bethnal Green. However, questions remain as to whether it is George’s fan club or an SWP front. Certainly, many leftwingers in England have refused to join up and remain deeply sceptical.

Yet there is a desperate need for a socialist party in England along the lines of the SSP. Namely an open, democratic, pluralist party that protects the rights of minorities yet unifies to promote socialist ideas and to offer an alternative to New Labour. The Socialist Party has made an appeal for this kind of organisation and, while their record suggests they may be less than successful, the objective is worthwhile.

Respect could be an important step towards such an organisation but the comrades in the SWP must learn the lessons of the SSP in Scotland and be ready to give up control, as the comrades in Scottish Militant Labour were willing to do, in order to create a genuinely democratic party. Is it possible for the SWP to change and give up bad habits? Or is it more likely that, in my old friend Sean Thompson’s words, Respect is not a dead parrot, but pretty shagged out?

I am sure the Weekly Worker will keep us well informed.

Hugh Kerr
SSP

Homophobic rot

A top Respect leader, parliamentary candidate and major financier - Dr Mohammed Naseem - has been revealed as a senior official of the Islamic Party of Britain (IPB), which advocates the banning of gay organisations and the execution of homosexuals.

According to the IPB’s website, “People afflicted with unnatural conditions like homosexuality or pedophilia [sic] need treatment, not encouragement.” The IPB’s home affairs policy would “safeguard public decency by preventing any public advocacy for homosexuality”. A violation of this law would fall under “public incitement”. For “public displays of lewdness witnessed by several people”, the “death penalty” would apply.

Respect MP George Galloway has to explain why his organisation promoted Dr Naseem to its national council and accepted thousands of pounds in donations from him. Dr Naseem was Respect’s largest election campaign donor, funding nearly a third of the party’s total general election expenditure earlier this year.

Did Dr Naseem buy his way into power and influence within Respect following his pledges of huge financial support? Was this financial support instrumental in persuading the Respect leadership to exclude gay rights from its general election manifesto? Did Dr Naseem’s donations help him secure nomination as Respect’s parliamentary candidate for Birmingham Perry Barr in the 2005 general election?

Proof of the homophobic rot at the heart of Respect is its open embrace of people and organisations that support the death penalty for homosexuality.

We stand in solidarity with the muslim community against prejudice and discrimination. Our objection is to the fundamentalist, anti-human-rights wing of islam, which threatens muslims here and worldwide. Instead of allying with fundamentalists, Respect should be linking up with liberal, progressive muslims, and defending muslims who are victimised by fundamentalists.

Brett Lock
Outrage

Conscience call

Mark Fischer writes that George Galloway told him: “There are very few matters of conscience for me ... And you know what they are ...” (Letters, November 24).

Presumably Mark and other CPGB members understand Galloway’s “matters of conscience” to include denying women the right to abortions and supporting Dr Mohammed Naseem’s call for death to homosexuals. What else does Mr Galloway’s “conscience” require? I will offer a guess - denying Jews the right to a homeland.

Jim Denham
Birmingham

Italian queries

I often read your articles about British far-left organisations. As an Italian worker and communist militant, I consider your articles quite useful in regard to understanding the reality of British politics.

I read that Respect has 4,000 members. Not many by Italian standards. And is it the biggest left organisation in Britain? How many copies of Socialist Worker are sold every week? And what of the other far-left papers?

I ask these questions because, from their websites, these organisations seem quite strong, but when I read estimates of the actual numbers involved, the reality appears to be somewhat different.

Luca Csepel
Italy

Sectarian

Members of the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA) at their meeting on November 26 decided not to take part in ‘Arise’ - the Socialist Alliance ‘refounded’ on November 12. A number of reasons were given by comrades.

What have we learned from nearly 10 years of the Socialist Alliance?

Firstly, that we want a campaign for a democratic socialist party along the lines constitutionally of the Scottish Socialist Party, where the left groups become platforms within that party.

Secondly, that the sectarian behaviour (ie, putting the interests of building their own organisation before the interests of the movement as a whole) of mainly the SWP and the SP within the SA has been a barrier to the development of the SA towards a mass party.

Thirdly, we do not want a federal structure where independent socialists become mere flotsam and jetsam, as the national committees of the left groups make the decisions which affect our organisation, the SA.

We believe that the refounded SA has taken a step backwards from these lessons we learned and expressed in the SA Democracy Platform. Through expediency, conciliationism, demoralisation - however one wishes to explain it - the comrades have gone back to methods and politics which created a disaster in the old Socialist Alliance and will do so again if they have their way.

Perhaps the most bizarre decision of the conference was writing into the constitution of the new organisation the political demand for republicanism as the key element, as though the monarchy is the main barrier to socialism in this country. Everybody knows that this is the main fetish and obsession of Steve Freeman and the Revolutionary Democratic Group. To impose it upon the new organisation without any proper discussion or understanding is sectarian beyond belief.

Dave Spencer
Coventry

War difference

I want to make a comment on Mark Fischer’s report of George Galloway’s remarks on World War II at a Respect rally in Hackney (November 17).

I seem to have been in a minority on the left in regard to this issue for most of my life, but I cannot see World War II as just another inter-imperialist war. There were features of this war, not least the nature of the fascist states, which mark it out as characteristically different. It was not a conflict in which one could simply call for the defeat of one’s own ruling class - posing it in this way meant calling for a victory to the Nazis.

Whereas we can say with some certainty that the conditions of life and labour for the workers of Europe would have remained unchanged whatever the outcome of World War I, this cannot be said of World War II, given the dramatically different goals of Nazism. There is of course a qualitative difference between conditions for workers and their political aspirations under a bourgeois democracy and those under a fascist dictatorship. A victory for fascism is a defeat for the hard-won democratic gains of the working class. The workers of the world recognised this, as they flocked to join the International Brigades in Spain to try and stop fascism getting its first toehold in Europe.

I often get the impression that some comrades think the extermination of the Soviet and European Jews was a sideline to Hitler’s grand plan. In fact it was a cornerstone of his vision and there was far more to come. Recently discovered long-term plans for the successful Reich involved plans to exterminate the gypsy population of Europe as a whole. Plans for the Serbian population of Russia and eastern Europe make the extermination of the Jews look like a warm-up exercise.

Quite aside from discussions about the nature of the USSR and defence of that state as against the bourgeois states, there is a simple argument here of making a stand against a qualitatively different level of political and social degeneracy embodied in the military and political forces of fascism.

It is true that the bourgeois democracies were not set in stone and had been quite prepared to contemplate going down the fascist road themselves. The ‘allied’ powers were all too ready to let fascism rip through Europe to wipe out the ‘red menace’. Neither am I suggesting for one moment that the respective ruling classes of the world did not continue to undertake their imperialist agendas throughout the course of the war, quite regardless of the nature of the enemy they happened to be in conflict with.

It is not where they stood that matters here, but where we, as communist workers, would have stood. Certainly we should have fought fascism, preferably on our own terms in red detachments, but clearly with some coordination with, although not subjugation to, the ‘allies’. At the same time we would have prosecuted the class war at home against ‘our own’ ruling class - unlike the CPGB’s then leadership, who made attacks on striking workers as part of their ‘war effort’.

I would never wear a poppy, but I recognise that millions of workers died fighting fascism in World War II, hating Churchill and his whole social system at the same time. Most did this out of advanced class consciousness, not some foolish patriotism. They fought so they would have the right and ability to speak freely, and organise as a class.

David Douglass
Doncaster

Dim view

Lila Patel (Letters, November 24) raises some bizarre arguments against social democracy in her response to my previous letter (November 17).

So social democracy only really works when a country has a small population, natural resources and the right cultural traditions? Really? The right political conditions might help, but how does population density or size work? What is the cutting-off point for social democracy numbers-wise?

Similarly, what natural resources do Nordic social democratic states have that we do not? Oil or gas? I think we have those. Snow, maybe? The reality is that you get social democracy when you persuade people to vote for parties offering it.

Is Lila also really arguing that tabloid newspapers, football, soaps and shopping are duping the workers into accepting the capitalist system? If these things will only keep the working class happy for a while, as Lila states, it would seem so. The Frankfurt School lives! It is, however, a rather dim view of workers.

Graeme Kemp
email

Cleaning lady

Not long ago one of your members referred to the section of your programme concerning women, in order to inform me that demands are made besides abortion. I searched your site and was insulted by what I found, not only on my behalf, but on behalf of my working class sisters, whom you patronise no end.

You state: “Under capitalism women carry out domestic labour, such as housework, child-rearing, etc, which is performed gratis. Given the technical possibilities to industrialise it, such work is enormously time-wasting. It is also dull, demoralising and does not allow for any kind of cultural development.”

Who judges it to be a ‘waste of time’ and “demoralising”? Middle class men who have never in their lives ironed a shirt? Housework can be therapeutic, as my working class grandmother (who also held a job outside the home) could testify; so can my mother. Dull as in comparison to what? Tedious manual work in a factory, or slaving in a call centre? Please do not tell me that McJobs allow for ‘cultural development’.

You lump childcare together with other forms of housework, thus implying that children are “dull”, “demoralising” and detrimental to the cultural development of their parents. What contempt you show for children.

Your solution to this perceived problem is as follows: “The establishment of laundry and house-cleaning services to be undertaken by the state. This to be the first step in the socialisation of housework.”

As such work is so beneath you, I ask you to enlighten me as to who would perform this work? Minimum-wage migrant workers, no doubt all of them women? I am quite happy to perform my own housework, thank you. Unlike the privileged elite, I do not regard it as being beneath me and have no desire to either pay anyone else or ask the state to pay a cleaning lady (let’s face it, it won’t be a man) to perform it for me.

More men help with housework than they used to and the traditional division of labour has shifted due to the changing needs of capital. Housework can be shared according to each partner’s workload outside the home - I see no problem with this. All people should be given a basic wage for housework: a liveable income. What they earn on top will be negotiable with their employers. I have no problem with free childcare for those who need it - parents do need their own time. But this is only on the agreement that the workers are paid above the minimum wage, that their work is properly valued and that measures are taken to recruit men to this work.

Just like men have always done, you undervalue and belittle the work done by women. The only difference is that you mask your views with radical-sounding rhetoric. What you are promoting are the traditional patriarchal values of the middle classes. And you wonder why the working class do not join you in droves.

Liz Hoskings
email

Print this page