Letters
Flagging up
Paul Cockshott’s letter further helps to open up a new discussion on the British left with regard to the European Union (October 15).
While the EU no doubt serves bourgeois interests, the reality of continental integration is something that must not be resisted with populist opportunism, such as the likes of ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’. The No2EU ‘coalition’ ran a Eurosceptic campaign in a Eurosceptic climate. The goal was not to truly resist the BNP and UK Independence Party, but to cash in on their success by promoting similar rhetoric. This is why the CPGB could not support it.
As an American (in the Socialist Party USA), I watched the EU elections debacle with a close eye, reading the Weekly Worker especially. While I was nonetheless disappointed to read that the CPGB had decided to call for a vote for Labour, I was still very appreciative of the fact that the CPGB did not support No2EU.
We here in the American socialist movement are firmly committed to the idea of open borders and the free movement of people. To see such a rightist campaign that singled out foreign workers being waged by ‘left’ elements was rather disturbing. It is not our choice as revolutionaries to choose between the nation-state and the continental union. We support neither, but we can recognise one as more progressive than the other.
It is odd that many ignore the possibilities of transnational political action offered by the EU. The downsides of the EU are because it is controlled by the capitalist class, but so is the nation-state. The US should be the clearest example of this. There never was any North American Union. But the ‘sovereignty’ of the American bourgeoisie only allowed it to maintain global dominance on its own, wreaking havoc through imperialist war and continuing oppression at home. And here we find the answer: the problem is not the EU; it is capitalism, a global system which must be abolished.
Revolutionaries of the left must not wage entire campaigns based on the issue of the European Union. What should have been formed during the EU elections in June was a new Socialist Alliance. Time will tell if such a thing will happen in the 2010 general election. The new left nationalists must be told that the enemy is capitalism, not Brussels. Stand and fight for a world without capitalism, where one day we will have a world socialist federation.
Leave the capitalist class of imperialist Britain behind and join a working class movement without borders. Lay down your union jack and pick up the great red flag.
Stancel Spencer
email
Agitated
Eddie Ford states that “it is tactically as legitimate to organise physical defence against groups like the EDL or the BNP (including pre-emptively) as it is to ruthlessly expose their rotten ideas on a shared platform” (‘A symptom of capitalist decay, not the main enemy’, October 15).
Really? The British National Party and its linked organisation, the English Defence League, carry out physical attacks on black and migrant workers. It is not only legitimate, but a necessity and a fundamental democratic right to organise self-defence against racist attacks.
We supported printworkers who took industrial action to refuse to print The Sun’s lies about the miners’ strike. We should support industrial action to deny airtime to Nick Griffin advocating that migrants be drowned at sea and inciting racist attacks against Muslims.
Organised self-defence and industrial action is only a small part of the solution - we need a revitalised workers’ movement and a fighting Communist Party to fight for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a workers’ society based on the highest democracy of workers’ councils. But sharing platforms with those advocating and carrying out physical attacks on workers will earn us derision and quite rightly so.
We should support demonstrations and industrial action against the BNP and organised self-defence against the EDL and BNP, whilst arguing clear class politics, agitating for solidarity action with postal workers and fighting for public services and decent pay.
Jason Travis
Permanent Revolution
Chasing his tail
Comrade John McKee of Permanent Revolution has written a stupidly illogical ‘critique’ of the CPGB’s view on the BNP and EDL, taking James Turley and myself to task for our recent articles (see ‘CPGB defends Nick Griffin’s “democratic rights”’: www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2859).
In a flagrant disregard for evidence and facts, the comrade writes that the EDL is the BNP’s “boot-boy front”. He accuses the CPGB and myself of “deliberate naivety” because we have looked at the evidence and facts, and concluded that the mutual antipathy between the BNP and EDL is genuine. Of course, we accept that individual BNP members have been involved with the EDL - why else would the BNP threaten disciplinary action against them and declare the EDL a “proscribed organisation”?
Comrade McKee fantasises about the BNP “wanting to maintain some distance between its respectable profile and its street fighting wing”, but this “entirely bogus separation is strictly for public consumption”. Think about it. How can the BNP say one thing in public, including to its own members and supporters, and precisely the opposite covertly? Don’t you think it might cause some confusion amongst its own rank and file if the BNP were secretly running the EDL and urging its members to support it, while publicly threatening them with expulsion if they did? We also accept that the BNP is perfectly capable of lying about all sorts of things, but it is the duty of communists to identify when it is doing so and when it might just be telling the truth.
McKee displays the usual inability to actually deal with what comrade James Turley and I have been saying: “Right on queue [sic], the CPGB’s Weekly Worker launches a campaign to explain why socialists and anti-fascists should abandon ‘no platform for fascists’ and support Griffin’s right to a place in the mass media.”
We have not launched any “campaign” for Nick Griffin’s “democratic rights”. We are for defending the hard won rights of the working class and oppose all state bans and censorship, which inevitably will be wielded against us. We therefore also oppose demands by the left for the state to enforce such bans or for media outlets like the BBC to decide what views are or are not acceptable. As for ‘no platform’, we want to restate the classical Marxist case for utilising various tactics in the struggle in the fight against the far right - tactics which obviously include denying them a platform when appropriate. In the early 1920s the Communist Party of Germany tore apart the ideas of the Nazis not only in pamphlets, but on shared platforms. Under different circumstances they were prepared to tear them apart physically.
Comrade McKee states: “Like Ben Lewis, Turley does not rule out action against the fascists, but not now of course.” Amazingly, he then goes on to quote comrade Turley precisely referring to “now”: “If our working class organisations, meetings and demonstrations are being directly threatened in a given locality, then socialists, trade unionists and others should take whatever steps are necessary to defend them. But this is not true of the situation in British politics at large.”
It is the final sentence quoted above that McKee particularly dislikes: “This is utter complacency. If [the CPGB] had any influence, which fortunately it doesn’t, it would completely disarm the struggle against fascism and the BNP. This precisely needs to take place before it has built roots and can mobilise its passive voting base onto the streets.” Note that comrade McKee does not dispute the contention that working class events are usually not physically attacked by far-right thugs at this time, but he wants us to behave (or pretend to behave) as though they were anyway.
What the comrade is unwilling, or unable, to countenance is that the main threat to the workers’ movement does not come from the far right. It is the bourgeois state that is preparing a full-scale assault on the postal workers, planning to impose vicious cuts on all of us, waging a murderous war in Afghanistan and - as Nick Griffin points out whenever he is interviewed - is actually deporting refugees and asylum-seekers in the here and now. As Trotsky lucidly points out in his writings on fascism (have any of the so-called Trotskyists even read this stuff?), confusing the nature of threat of the far right can have disastrous tactical and strategic implications.
The icing on the cake comes when McKee scoffs at me for highlighting the core of the problem: the inability of the purportedly Marxist left to articulate its own political alternative in elections in the struggle to become a recognised force in society. He writes: “So, while the BNP are busy spreading their fascist politics across the media, the Marxists need to win elections in order to force ‘the establishment to start taking us seriously’. As if the establishment have ever been forced to do anything by the election of MPs.”
This is pathetic. The BNP is becoming recognised in society because it is standing candidates, getting elected and on some sort of level winning the political argument amongst a working class left high and dry by the idiocy of the confessional sects. Instead of constructing a response which focuses on the main enemy - the capitalist state - and on the need for a working class party and programme capable of challenging it, too many on the left want to chase around after the BNP like a dog chasing its tail.
As it cannot beat the BNP where it counts - in the battle of ideas - it views the ill-organised and disparate forces of the EDL as a godsend, pretending it is seeing off the “fascist” BNP’s “street fighting wing”.
If my insistence on party, programme and winning the battle of ideas makes me a “liberal wearing a communist mask” and a “democrat, not a communist”, then that says everything about McKee. We in the CPGB are the ones who have consistently fought for the unity of Marxists as Marxists in a political party now, whereas the PR comrades go along with the left ‘common sense’ of setting up organisations ‘not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution’ to swim in, as a means of building their own narrow sect.
Small wonder then that leading PR member Bill Jefferies was so keen on blocking attempts to mobilise against the EDL in Manchester around openly socialist politics. Much better to tail the bourgeois multiculturalist consensus and throw in a bit of 1980s rhetoric for good measure.
Ben Lewis
London
Advantage BNP
The ‘alternative vote’ system has been proposed by the Labour Party for electing members of the House of Commons.
This electoral system might have the effect of giving undue advantage to the British National Party, unlike the much better ‘single transferable vote’ system proposed by the Electoral Reform Society.
Dave Womersley
email
Kids know
Arthur Lawrence seeks to redefine the meaning of the word ‘paedophile’ (Letters, October 8). There is really no need. A paedophile is, simply enough, an adult who finds pre-pubescent children sexually attractive. No, it does not mean someone who “desires a sexual relationship as understood by adults” with a child. It also includes sexual encounters with children as understood by children.
As to the notion of pre-pubescents who cannot possibly understand ‘adult’ sexuality, does that mean he excludes those pre-pubescents who do understand it? Or that biologically and by definition a pre-pubescent isn’t ready for sexual intercourse? While this is true, sex and sexuality is also socially inspired and puberty, like revolution, isn’t an event, but a process. Girls, for example, who haven’t yet started to have periods can have breasts; and, with or without breasts or periods, pre-pubescents can have very strong sexual impulses of the pubescent kind.
If he thinks pre-pubescents can’t possibly understand full sexual relations, he certainly doesn’t live on a working class housing estate, where many pre-pubescents think, dress and act exactly as young teenagers would have say 40-50 years ago. He might also ask any of the kids (if he knows any) what ‘shag bands’ are: thousands are wearing them all over the country and, while many do so without actually having the sexual act they depict, they all know what that sexual act is, and some of them at least have actually engaged in it.
None of this is to condone or recommend paedophile activity. If Arthur meant that they couldn’t possibly understand the social consequences for a prepubescent engaging in sexual activity with an adult in today’s society, he’s right, of course. The ton of bricks dropped on them by social services, the police, the school, the community and the press will immediately condemn them to victimhood and enforce some sexual/mental cripple status upon them. The whole witch-hunt scenario depends upon them being innocents who’ve been violated - a sexually active, even predatory, pre-pubescent has to be brainwashed and ‘treated’ until they accept their status as a wide eyed, non-consensual, non-sexual child.
As for the adult, if any of them fully understood the social consequences of their actions once they get caught, they certainly wouldn’t engage in it either. It’s been pointed out in this paper before by someone else, that sexual activity with a pre-pubescent, no matter how minor the action, and how consensual the child is now an offence greater than violent rape or attempted murder.
What’s more, they can never serve the sentence and will never be free for the rest of their lives, living under severe social restrictions. Hounded until they die. Why would they do it?
Frankly I don’t understand homosexual lust either, but it continued right through the period when it too was witch-hunted and violently, socially and legally repressed. I recognise it’s as strong as heterosexual lust, strong enough to see it practised despite the threat of flogging, maiming, imprisonment and even death in some countries and time periods. Presumably the paedophile lust is no more and no less strong and is highly addictive.
It’s said you can’t make someone have a sexuality they don’t already have - you can’t ‘encourage’ someone to be homosexual, for example. I’m not sure that that’s true. I wonder if all the fuss and hoo-ha over paedophilia hasn’t in some perverse sense popularised it, or created a morbid sexual curiosity about it, which has taken a great many adults who previously wouldn’t have had any inclinations toward sex with a child to fantasise about it, seek it out on the web, and ultimately engage in it?
It’s a weird world, but if we all just live and let live and leave people alone, perhaps mind our own sexual business, I’m sure society wouldn’t come crashing down.
Willie Hunter
Berwick Upon Tweed
Don’t deport Sheida
Sheida Jahanbin, a former member of Students for Freedom and Equality in Iran, is facing deportation from the Netherlands, where she resides in exile.
Sheida is 27 years old. She was a student of architecture and graphic design at Azad University, Tehran, before she was forced to abandon her studies and flee Iran following her arrest for holding a leftwing meeting. Before she left Iran, she had a promising career in journalism. If Sheida is deported, she will face arrest, prison, torture and even death.
We call on our supporters and friends to write to the Dutch consulate and send messages of solidarity to her solicitor supporting her case to be granted leave to stay permanently in the Netherlands. Her IND number is 0808-14-1310.
If you can get your union to send letters of support, please send a copy via email to Hands Off the People of Iran at office@hopoi.org.
Please send letters and messages of protest to: R Hijma, Postbus 14002, 3508 SB Utrecht, Netherlands; and Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 38 Hyde Park Gate, London SW7 5DP.
Dan Crone
email
