Letters
Simple terms
I think that Jim Moody is correct in much of what he says about the left and fighting fascism (‘Egg on whose face?’, June 18). We need a discussion on these items. But I’m not sure that it is an ‘either-or’ in the way that Jim’s article suggests.
Given what we know about the left in Britain today, the likelihood of it coming together to create a new Marxist party is not particularly great. So it is not a good idea to base your tactics and strategy around it. Personally, I believe that Marxists should all be in the existing workers’ party, the Labour Party - arguing and demonstrating their politics in practice with the real workers there is the best means of achieving some degree of common activity, and testing those ideas in the only way that counts: whether you can actually win workers to them, because you have shown they work. In fact, working through the Labour Party and trade unions is the best means of creating the kind of united labour movement opposition to fascism that we need rather than the various anti-fascist organisations that subordinate socialist politics to attracting liberals and vicars.
I also agree with Jim about the policy of not confronting the fascists’ ideas in debate. We should stick with the idea of ‘no platform’ in the sense that we should support actions by workers that deny the fascists the ability to simply spread their filth unchallenged. The actions of the postal workers are an example of this. Where fascists are interviewed for TV, radio or the press without an equal statement by the left, we should support action by workers to simply pull the plug or black out the page.
But, the fascists of the BNP are trying to be cleverer than that by raising arguments that can have some resonance within the working class. Simply refusing to debate these ideas is stupid and does us damage in the eyes of workers. Part of the problem is that over the years the left has spent so long simply talking to itself that it takes some very basic arguments for granted and, when confronted by a challenge to those ideas from people like the BNP, it often does not have a very good response, almost amounting to ‘Well, that idea is stupid’.
Perhaps, but unless you can explain to workers m:why it is stupid, there is no reason for workers to believe you, and then simply arguing to prevent the BNP from speaking looks like you have no real response. So I think Jim is right that if the BNP are being interviewed - and they are and will be more often now - then the left has to develop short, sharp responses that can, in simple terms, destroy the fascists’ arguments.
I hope the Weekly Worker website is back in operation soon, but I think it would be useful if you also had a comments page or discussion board, such as those run by Permanent Revolution and the AWL (though hopefully not deleting awkward comments, as do the latter).
Arthur Bough
email
Kill them
No genuine communist party can exist unless it is theoretically based on the fundamental principles of communism. It has been stressed by Lenin that these fundamental principles are those of “soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Leftwing communism London 1993, p115). Yet comrade Mike Macnair, in his article ‘Against rightist populism’ (June 4), expresses views which represent a clear rejection of the fundamentals of both soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The capitalist state (armed forces, police, judiciary, etc) has as its prime purpose the suppression of the working class. If a revolutionary situation develops, the armed forces and police would be used to suppress any attempt by the working class to take state power. To overcome this threat the full force of the working class must be mobilised. This can only be done through the organs of struggle which it has spontaneously created. The highest organs of struggle built in Britain were the councils of action set up in 1926. These were in fact soviets. In a future revolutionary situation these will undoubtedly rise again.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is undoubtedly an inescapable necessity. When the working class is able to win state power, the capitalist class will fight for its counterrevolutionary aims with unparalleled ferocity. The task of communists and the soviets is therefore to institute a strict dictatorship against the capitalist class in order to prevent a counterrevolution. This will be made possible by the democracy that has been established in the soviets.
It may be concluded that a genuine communist revolution must imply dictatorship for the capitalist class and the highest form of democracy for the working class organised in its soviets. The concept of “extreme democracy” put forward by comrade Macnair is really meaningless. There can be no abstract democracy (extreme or otherwise) in class society. Democracy is a class question.
The rejection of soviets in favour of parliament is shown in comrade Macnair’s call for “a single-chamber parliament ... annual parliaments ... proportional representation ... election of ministers by parliament” and so on.
It is clear from this that comrade Macnair envisages a revolution in which universal suffrage is the norm. In other words, all members of the capitalist class and their counterrevolutionary hangers-on each have a vote equal to that of revolutionary workers. Here we can presume that during the course of a communist revolution, or at least in the period immediately preceding it, the capitalist class will, as at present, have total control of newspapers and the mass media. This will, of course, make it very difficult for those workers who are not communists to understand the revolutionary significance of the setting up of soviets. The continuation of universal suffrage would thus place the working class at a disadvantage.
Comrade Macnair calls for proportional representation in parliamentary elections. This certainly implies freedom for non-revolutionary or even counterrevolutionary parties to exist. This is a completely non-communist approach.
Comrade Macnair’s implied attack on the dictatorship of the proletariat is developed in his views on the capitalist state machine. Thus, whilst he calls for the disbanding of M15, M16 and special branch, he stops short of calling for the disbanding of the police. But, as most militant workers and young people will know, the police are ‘institutionally racist’ and riddled with capitalist ideology. In any strike they will be on the side of the employers and their scabs and against the strikers. Witness the miners’ strike. It will be one of the principal tasks of the British soviets to smash the police organisation and replace it with a workers’ militia.
Comrade Macnair correctly calls for the replacement of the standing armed forces by a militia. However, he totally avoids the question of how the standing armed forces are to be replaced. This task surely has to be carried out be soviets led by communists.
One of the essential tasks of soviet power, after the revolution, will be to institute working class courts to deal with criminals and counterrevolutionaries.
Comrade Macnair avoids this question. He is clearly in favour of keeping intact the existing capitalist legal apparatus. Thus he proposes: “direct limits on maximum legal fees; the flattening of judicial hierarchies; and the subordination of the law-making powers of the judiciary to the legislature”. The capitalist legal system has to be smashed and replaced by one representing the working class.
Comrade Macnair states that he is opposed to state speech controls. Thus he opposes “even speech controls against fascists. We share the classic view of liberals and libertarians that the best remedy for the publication of false, stupid, racist, etc views is free discussion, in which they can be openly contradicted.” Here it is necessary to remind ourselves that fascists stand for the mass murder of working class militants, socialists and communists. We have always to keep the holocaust in mind. The task of communists is not to hold polite conversations with fascists. Rather, our task - when the time comes - is to shoot them.
John Robinson
London
Decent burial
John Masters thinks that I believe it is time to create a Labour Party mark two because I opposed a vote for Labour in the European elections (Letters, June 11). Having spent over 20 frustrating years in the Labour Party, I hardly need another dose in a mini-version.
In my ward branch, I was the socialist left. The rest were either older people who had joined in the 1950s or younger potential careerists. It is not a question of being Labour’s hangman, but of giving the corpse a decent burial. And the leadership has so changed the rules that it is now impossible for it to be shoved leftwards.
I have never grasped the concept of a bourgeois workers’ party. A party represents the interests of one class or another. Whatever happened in the past, today Labour represents the interests of the ruling class. Voting for it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
If a new mass workers’ party is to arise, it will have to be qualitatively different from anything that existed in the past or exists today. It will have to address the working class in language it understands rather than in cliché-ridden jargon that sounds like a bad translation of 1920s Russian. It will have to address new issues and concerns, such as potential environmental disaster. It will have to avoid diluting and compromising its socialism and have a clear vision of what a socialist society will be like.
Sadly, it is true there is no mass support for socialism of any sort. But if enough people can drag themselves out of the mire of contemporary leftist politics, it can be created. The alternative does not stand contemplating.
Terry Liddle
London
Gulag calling?
“There was uproar at the Unite London United Left on Thursday night [June 18] when any discussion of the Mitie workers’ dispute at Willis was blocked and the sacked Unite cleaners’ rep at Schroeders, Alberto Durango, was denied the opportunity to address the meeting.
“Two officers from the Clerkenwell and St Pancras branch of Unite who have supported the sacked cleaners attended the meeting ... They came with Alberto, a member of the Unite cleaners branch committee. They attended expecting to secure solidarity from other Unite activists in London in widening support for the cleaners and to back calls for assistant general secretary Jack Dromey to reverse his withdrawal of support for the dispute. The complete opposite occurred” (Chris Kane, thecommune.wordpress.com).
What a sick bunch of class traitors who would do this to a representative of the most oppressed workers in the land. But Alberto’s method was to fight the bosses and mobilise the ranks of his membership; the actions of Unite officials was to broker a class compromise to achieve some union subs but leave the workers where they were - remember JJ Fast Foods, brother Kelly? (Jim Kelly, the bureaucratic chair of the meeting, had supported the JJ Fast Foods strike about a decade ago, making just this point about the T&G bureaucracy himself.)
As Alberto observed, “United Left? These people are just rightwingers.” Of course they are and Alberto’s intervention tore aside the mask of these fake leftists completely on the night. He and his supporters won the taking of a vote at the second time of asking because of the intervention of a Socialist Party steward (the No2EU rotten bloc surely cannot survive this treachery). The 28-39 vote (Jim Kelly’s count has been questioned) to silence Alberto (because there were six people in the meeting who did not agree with the conduct of the dispute) revealed the truth.
The meeting of about 70 was already highly charged, as both the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party of Britain-dominated bureaucracy had mobilised for it. The United Left is fundamentally a nomenklatura organisation, a jobs-and-positions-allocating Woodleyite front. Every vote against Alberto was bought and paid for by that system. It combines the former TGWU Broad Left and the Amicus Gazette group. It was set up as a ‘consensus’ organisation where no votes were to be taken except in extremis and even then they were to be ‘weighted’- ie, bureaucrats would arrive at meetings with members’ votes in their pockets to ensure no rank-and-file mass movement could swamp them. And, of course, a ‘slate’ of leadership contenders for the AGM would be agreed in advance to be ‘consensus-ised’. Applause was the method of testing support - you could fold your arms if you were a ‘troublemaker’ and did not approve.
Both the SWP and the Socialist Party had agreed to this, but events in the class struggle had ripped this consensus apart. In short, the SP was welcomed into the No2EU-CPB-Bob Crow chauvinist Europhobic ‘platform’, whereas the SWP was excluded because it took a ‘bad’ (ie, half-good) position on ‘British jobs for British workers’. In fact, the SWP did not force a vote on their exclusion from the United Left slate because they could see that the CPB/full-time bureaucrats had mobilised heavily against them, and their slate was duly elected.
The meeting demonstrated the rise and rise of the trade union bureaucracy and the snuffing out of democracy for the ranks of the membership itself. If you want to advance in the union structures, you must comply with the system of patronage; you must vote as required; you must betray your class to advance your own career. To some of the hard-line Stalinists present, this was back to the Gulag days and so was no problem. Rod Finlayson was confident in his Stalinism and in his attacks on MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell and “their supporters here”. The MPs had supported Alberto and the Mitie cleaners and this was ‘interfering in the internal affairs’ of Unite by exposing the union’s anti-working class ‘partnership’ methods.
Jim Kelly excelled himself in his bureaucratic railroading of the meeting. “Are you sure?” he shouted at a wayward supporter who voted to hear the victimised cleaner speak. He might as well have said, ‘No seat on the regional committee for you, comrade’.
But surely the accolade for class traitor of the night (there were many rivals!) must go to Bronwyn Handyside. This former Trotskyist, fellow Workers’ Revolutionary Party central committee member, editor of Workers Press and champion of the Liverpool dockers against Bill Morris’s treachery sold her soul to the Stalinist bureaucracy on the TGWU Broad Left some time back when she accepted their patronage to advance in the union structures. When she voted to deny the victimised cleaners’ rep a voice, she at least had the good grace to blush and afterwards say she wished it had not come to a vote.
Surely the SWP and SP must now recognise the hopelessly undemocratic nature of this full-time officer-dominated group and begin to fight within it to form a new, principled, anti-bureaucratic rank-and-file opposition of class-struggle fighters.
Gerry Downing
Socialist Fight
National joke
Yossi Schwartz (Letters, June 18) responds to my letter (June 4), but he does not seem to have read what I had actually written.
First, I never denied that there are fewer Hebrews (so-called Israeli Jews) than Palestinian Arabs worldwide. What I said was that the Palestinian Arabs are a national minority in Israel. This is a fact: they constitute approximately 20% of Israel’s population.
Second, he alleges: “Machover, it seems, believes that the majority of the Israelis, unlike the ruling class of Israel, do not believe in Zionism.” What I actually implied was the very opposite: “the only thing that prevents the Hebrew nation from recognising itself openly and officially as a separate nation is the dominance of Zionist ideology”. How can an ideology be dominant if the majority do not believe in it?
Third, he argues at length, using extensive quotes from Lenin and Trotsky scriptures that the Hebrew nation should be denied the right to national self-determination. I did not raise the matter of Hebrew self-determination at all in my June 4 letter, nor in my earlier article (‘Breaking the chains of Zionist oppression’, February 19). This was deliberate, because I was arguing at a more fundamental level, that of national equality. Not all socialists advocate the right of nations to self-determination; but all socialists deserving of this name insist on equality of national rights: no nation should enjoy a national privilege denied to another nation.
However, comrade Schwartz in effect looks forward to a future in which Zionism will have been overthrown, the Palestinian Arabs will have won the right to national self-determination, but the Hebrew nation - no longer the oppressor - will be denied that same right. This reminds me of the old Soviet joke: ‘In the USSR we no longer have exploitation of man by man; here it is the other way around.’
Moshé Machover
email
Gunned down
I couldn’t let Tony Clark’s totally ahistorical, liberal position on the right to bear arms go without a comment (Letters, June 18).
Tony argues a new one for me. A demand that is “above class”. Nope. Can’t have a democratic demand that can be used by the class enemy can we, like ‘freedom of speech’ or the ‘right to assemble’? Does Tony have any historical understanding of democratic demands at all?
The second amendment to the US constitution was a plebeian victory, as was the entirety of the US bill of rights, enacted after the fact of the main bourgeois constitution, written by the rich white guys from Virginia and Pennsylvania. It was, has been and still is seen as part and parcel of a democratic revolution that wasn’t fully consummated until the end of the US civil war. The rights stated therein have no less meaning today than they did 200 years ago.
Does it occur to Tony that the bourgeoisie is already armed - hence state power? That the capitalists always try to disarm our class and use a myriad of methods - regulations, criminalisation and so on - to keep us from being armed? In the United States, where I reside, it is currently already ‘banned’ for anyone at all with a criminal record to buy, own or even hold a firearm. Of course, “criminal gangs” usually have them smuggled in from other countries. 99.99% of all legally purchased, registered firearms in the US are held by those to whom Tony is appealing: citizens who have committed and have no intention of committing a ‘crime’.
Tony really has no argument as to why a worker or anyone who lives under the iron heel of capitalism, as lightly as that may appear to be applied in liberal US and UK society, can’t simply own a gun.
David Walters
San Francisco
Grown-up politics
The Socialist Workers Party has published just three responses to its ‘Open letter to the left’ on its website. The most substantial is from Michael Rosen, the poet and former Respect candidate.
Rosen proposes an umbrella organisation of a federal nature, and is in favour of local groups being largely autonomous from any kind of central control: “In a federation, it may be that one or other of our groups or organisations has done the most work in that locality. Then we should be grown-up enough to give that organisation pride of place and the rest of us do what we can to support them.”
If the only criterion for deciding on the work to be done in an area is that we defer to the busiest group of comrades, then where lies democracy in the federation? The group doing the most work will not necessarily have been doing correct work. It may just mean they are the only comrades in that particular town or county. What is “grown-up” about that?
The things that divide us are not childish and the solutions to unity therefore need to be grown-up. The main division is the question of reform or revolution. This schism is clearly irreconcilable; an organisation is either one or the other. It is folly to imagine that reformists and revolutionaries can work together in one party. When it comes to unity, we are talking about the unity of revolutionaries.
The SWP, however, would appear to have something less useful in mind. Take the words of comrade Chris Harman who, according to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website, has “posed the need to ‘break with New Labour’ as an almost mystical concept” and “claimed that the reason previous ‘left unity initiatives’ had failed … was because they were all initiated at periods when there was still too high a degree of Labourite consciousness within the British working class for them to have an impact.” Harman is quoted as saying that “if you could get Alice Mahon, Bob Crow, Arthur Scargill, Mark Serwotka, Clare Short to get together, and maybe persuade Tony Benn, then you’ve got the basis for a campaign that could become a real pole of attraction”.
So we have the comrade - whose own pamphlets and speeches at Marxism events convinced me that the reformist path was not the path to socialism and of the need for a revolutionary party - proposing a reformist alternative to the Labour Party. For the life of me, I can’t imagine Clare Short embracing the revolution, let alone Tony Benn. And Crow and Scargill have shown where they stand on the ‘revolution versus reform’ divide. If Harman has his way, the revolutionary SWP would be liquidated into a reformist bloc to the left of Labour: a Labour Party mark two but ‘timed right’.
His analysis of previous initiatives not working because of timing is dubious. It presumes that Labour lost votes because their support didn’t turn out due to moving to the left of Brown. Political opinion in Britain is now crowded on the middle ground and has been for some time. The only people yearning for a left alternative are the left. To judge the success of unity ventures by the votes they manage to attract is fallacious, especially when they have had such short lives.
John Masters
Hertfordshire
Twisted sporran
I rather enjoyed reading Steve Hudson’s letter in last week’s Weekly Worker (June 18) commenting on my article, ‘End of SSP dream’ (June 11). Steve raises some interesting points - some unintentionally.
Steve assumed that I am either not Scottish or not based in Scotland, and that I visited Scotland in order to write the report. I am, in fact from Scotland and am currently living in Glasgow (the name ‘McDonald’ might have indicated something to Steve, although I would hate to accuse him of being a “lazy” letter-writer). Clearly it is an anathema to Steve that anyone born north of the border could be so vehemently opposed to Scottish separatism, which says more about Steve’s world view than it does about mine.
Steve has his sporran all in a twist complaining that I did not give a balanced view of the Scottish left. I should perhaps make Steve aware that I did, in fact, speak to Scottish Socialist Party comrades, as well as comrades from the SWP, CWI, CPB and No2EU when preparing my article. The idea that I got the “‘inside’ story” on the SSP’s demise from Solidarity comrades is truly bizarre.
The article had three focuses: the SSP, No2EU and the Labour Party/SNP. I argued that neither No2EU nor the SSP had been viable options in terms of a working class vote in the Euro election and I gave the reasons why.
As for Steve’s objection to my description of Make Greed History as “sickeningly moralistic” - it is. The very fact that this is the title of the campaign which the SSP was pushing for the European election, in its leaflets, on its banners at the May Day marches (yes, I was there, Edinburgh and Glasgow) shows a pathetic lack of politics.
Let’s have a look at the Make Greed History website, shall we? The opening line is: “Most of the world’s problems today can be traced back to a single cause. Greed.” What of capitalism? “Greed has also corrupted the political system with politicians pocketing expenses for everything from 32-inch TVs to having their moats cleaned and making money playing the property market.” As I explained in my article (perhaps you should read it, Steve), the question of greed is really irrelevant. What is at the root of poverty, inequality, war, etc is the system of capital. Make Greed History lets capitalism off the hook and panders to the idea that the world’s problems lie with the behaviour of individuals.
Of course, most comrades in the SSP have enough of an understanding of Marxism to realise this. The whole point behind Make Greed History is that it was designed to have a sentimental appeal to working class people on the back of the expenses scandal in a way that is reminiscent of a charity campaign. It was not designed to programmatically arm and engage the working class with the politics required for human liberation.
Steve tries desperately to make out that the SSP campaign was a success - “over 10,000 people voted for radical socialism”. This is, quite frankly, farcical. The left (all of it) received an abysmal vote - and deservedly so. In Scotland, just as in Britain as a whole, it has failed to meet the challenges of the period. It has bought into nationalist, reformist and economistic policies, which attempt, and fail, to win the working class from Labour by providing it with … well, another version of Labour. The election results indicate a rightward trajectory, involving a further shift from class-consciousness to national consciousness. Let’s attempt a sober analysis rather than hype up less than one percent of the vote as anything other than what it is: derisory.
The SSP’s biggest achievement was in uniting the left in Scotland into one, relatively democratic, partyist formation - for a limited period, at least. Steve is correct to recognise this (although he does not seem to realise that I myself was a member of the SSP for several years). Even this partial unity of the left would have been a significant step forward for our movement, if it had been done on a principled basis, not that of left nationalism. What is needed is the unity of the left across Britain in a Marxist party - I argued that in the SSP, as I do now.
The SSP’s adoption of Scottish separatism began as an opportunistic attempt to cash in on rising nationalist sentiment, when these ideas needed to be defeated and the unity of our class won. This particular opportunism soon became integral to the politics and character of an organisation that now advocated the division of a historically constituted working class along national lines. Giving a platform at election rallies to comrades from leftwing organisations in other countries does not prove the SSP’s internationalism. Neither does fetishising Cuba as ‘socialist’.
The limited left unity which the SSP facilitated has gone, as has the support it gained among workers. This is not a situation which fills me with ‘glee’, as Steve would have it - in fact, quite the opposite. I am disappointed that a project I was involved with for so long has failed so dismally, especially in the manner in which it did. I am deeply saddened by the fact that some of my friends and comrades no longer speak to each other. Most of all, I am angry that the working class movement has been set back to the extent that it has, with so many having deserted the politics of class for that of nationalism.
You don’t need “oracular powers” or “crystal balls” to see the demise of the SSP, Steve - just eyes.
Sarah McDonald
Glasgow (honest!)
No offence
Public and Commercial Services union representative Mark France is being disciplined by civil service managers on charges of petitioning for disgraced Tory MP Julie Kirkbride to stand down over her expenses. Currently sick with stress caused by this victimisation, he will find out in a week what happens next.
This outrageous move is a clear attempt to use the civil service code to crush the basic right of ordinary people to hold their so-called superiors to account. It is a striking contrast to how management have treated BNP candidates in the civil service.
For example, the right of Frank Swaine, neo-nazi BNP candidate from the Hastings Child Support Agency office to stand in elections, appear on television and issue fascist propaganda has been unwearyingly upheld by civil service managers. In the meantime decent people such as Mark find their careers at risk for saying that corruption is wrong.
Messages of support can be sent to mafrance@hotmail.co.uk. Please rally your organisations to support him and spread the word, so that as many people as possible know what our rulers think of free speech.
Sam Buckley
CSA Hastings PCS
