Letters
Respect
Firstly, my deepest condolences to Rannoch Daly on the loss of his father (Letters, August 27).
I am grateful for his clarification of the reasons why Lawrence left the CPGB. I was not, however, suggesting that nobody in the National Union of Mineworkers knew Lawrence was still alive, though in ill-health. Subsequent information revealed that a number of people in the NUM leadership knew what had happened to him.
My point was that neither I nor most of the NUM membership, who had fought alongside Lawrence and had been proud to call him a comrade in the early years, had this information. I had presumed he had died much earlier and clearly this was an error. I didn’t discover until just before he died what had actually happened to him. Likewise, it had been suggested that his mother had moved back to Scotland and this too, as it turned out, was an inaccurate guess.
Neither of these two errors was in any way meant to cause offence or be misleading. My respect for Lawrence is hopefully evident in my obituary to him.
David Douglass
email
Flexible fascists
According to Ben Lewis the British National Party is not fascist (‘How not to stop the BNP’, July 23). This is because “Fascist parties in the first half of the 20th century were typically characterised by their command of non-state combat units and mass mobilisations against the organised working class. That is what marks fascism out from other forms of bourgeois counterrevolutions.”
This essentially one-sided Trotskyist understanding of fascism seems to have led certain members of the CPGB to believe that the BNP is no longer a fascist party. The problem they have, together with many on the left, is one of dogmatism. Thus they fail to start from understanding the obvious, which is that communists developed their theory of fascism in a period of social upheavals and incipient civil war, so it is no accident that they emphasised fighting detachment as a prominent feature of fascism.
When a society is heading towards civil war, both fascism and the left begin to organise fighting detachments. No-one would argue that communists cease to be communists because events have not led to fighting detachments, yet Lewis wants us to believe that the BNP is not fascist for that reason. In other words, he fails to see that combat organisations express mass polarisation of a society heading towards civil war. Lewis, and others who think like him, can only recognise fascism under conditions leading to civil war.
If he was not blinded by dogmatism, Lewis would understand that we cannot expect fascism to be the same in peaceful and non-peaceful times. Furthermore, Marxism teaches that a political party is defined firstly by its programme: that is to say, its goals. We start from the ends a particular party is pursuing, and not any particular means it utilises to achieve these ends. For instance, the end the BNP is pursuing is not only to establish a fascist state in Britain, but a more racist country, and this brings the it closer to the Nazi version of fascism than other forms.
Fascism is a counterrevolutionary, extremely nationalist movement which comes to power on the basis of mass support and proceeds to abolish civil liberties and bourgeois democracy, a process which, by the way, begins before the fascist assume power. The BNP is such a party.
The nature of the Communist Party is also determined by its goals or aims, formulated in a programme; this nature is not determined by any particular form of struggle. For instance, Lenin taught the Bolsheviks the need for flexibility in the struggle for power. Hitler taught the importance of flexibility to German fascism. Now Nick Griffin is teaching the flexibility lesson to British fascists. Although he fails to draw the necessary conclusion, Lewis points this out when he quotes Griffin writing that we must appear moderate to the electorate, but teach the hardcore the truth. What is this truth that dare not speaks its name to the electorate, if not Nazism, or its British equivalent?
Those who imagine that fascism must remain the same under all social conditions are deluding themselves and end up deceiving the working class. There is no reason to assume that fascist leaders are less intelligent than communist ones, and do not live, learn and recognise the need for flexibility in the pursuit of power. Indeed, they often display more flexibility than the communists, who tend to be more constrained by dogma and ideas they have learnt by rote, as Lenin found to his chagrin in 1917.
Tony Clark
London
Playing with fire
The letters of Andrew Northall and Dave Brown (August 27) attempt to discredit Jack Conrad’s recent articles against the Socialist Workers Party position of Tony Greenstein on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Both Northall and Brown invoke the myths of the ultra-left against the bogeyman of Zionism. Yet, historically, ‘Palestine’ was an invention of the Romans used to designate the tribe of ‘Philistines’. There never was a Palestinian state prior to the British mandate, which displaced the Ottoman empire after World War I. In many respects, the British presence was progress.
Israel clearly existed for centuries before the Islamists conquered the whole of the territory now known as Israel and it was this invasion that led to the crusades, though in politically correct circles the history is conveniently reversed.
Israel has the right of self-determination. Not because it seeks to subjugate the so-called Palestinians, who, as evidenced above, never constituted a displaced nation. Nor because the Israeli Arabs have better democratic and civil rights, better access to healthcare, housing and education and better life chances than in any Islamic state. But because Israelis have the same right to their own state as we do.
Israel faces an existential threat from Iran and the Islamic world because Islam seeks to restore the caliphate. It mourns its loss of the Ottoman empire.
Tony Greenstein has been criticised not because he advocates anti-Semitism, but because he advocates the destruction of Israel and thus plays into the hands of the anti-Semites. Such reactionary forces would never give socialists and communists, or modernists, an even-handed debate. They would use violence and thuggery.
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is right. Tony Greenstein and most of the left today are playing with fire. “We are all Hezbollah now,” they chanted: a shameless spectacle and parallel of 1933, when communists and fascists collaborated in Germany, just as today when the left forms alliances with Islamic clerical fascism.
Congratulations to the Weekly Worker for standing up for democratic and civil rights in Iran and Gaza, and calling for real democratic elections in those territories, which are desperately needed.
Henry Mitchell
London
PR party
I note that all four of your Communist University speakers agreed with the idea of a Marxist party (‘What sort of party and how to get it’, August 27). I also note that your party has adopted support for proportional representation, which is not a traditional Marxist position (but one also adopted by the Socialist Party, Communist Party of Britain and Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers Party).
I have a question: do you want ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist’ in the name of the party, despite such terms’ association with the USSR? If not, I would welcome and join such a party despite not being a Marxist! I would encourage such a party to advocate PR as well as participatory democracy, and perhaps online discussions and referenda to make decisions.
I suggest the name for such a party: Democratic Revolutionary Socialist Party.
Steve Wallis
Democratic Socialist Alliance
Chile strike
One hundred and three miners from Tambillo, a small mining village in the region of Coquimbo in Chile, have been on official strike since May 1. By September they had been out for over 120 days without pay, in the longest strike in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990.
The pit is owned by one of the largest capitalists in Chile, Francisco Javier Errázuriz, a well known Pinochet supporter and anti-union rightwinger. Luis Robles, the miners’ official spokesperson, said:
“Errázuriz doesn’t know the miners, whose work makes him rich. He never gives back to the community, to the school, or makes pension contributions. He just uses us for working in his mines and exploits the public infrastructure of Tambillo to transport his copper. It would be great to work in a mine controlled by the miners themselves.”
The strike began following the failure of the annual pay negotiations in April. Errázuriz demanded that the Tambillo miners accept a 35% pay cut. If the miners wanted to maintain their pay at its original level, then wages could be made up through bonuses, which if not reached would result in the sack.
The miners rejected the pay offer and held a mass meeting of all union members. Of 104 present 101 voted in favour of a strike from May 1. Errázuriz responded by illegally withholding the miners’ April pay and bonus and sacking 50 non-union miners on the spot. Since then Errázuriz has refused to negotiate or meet with the strikers.
The strike is solid, but the miners are suffering constant police surveillance and harassment, which turned into a brutal assault when the police moved to break up a peaceful protest outside the pit entrance in June. Miners, their families and children had gathered to support a 10-day hunger strike of three miners and two university students.
The miners are actively supported by their wives, who take part in the daily picket, organise welfare activities and publicise the strikers’ demands, even while they are struggling to provide food and bus fares for their children to attend school.
The miners have successfully taken Errázuriz to court, where he was found guilty of breaching trade union law and ordered by the magistrate to pay the miners’ April pay and bonus in full and fined for his anti-union activities.
The miners of Tambillo, are determined to fight on until their pay cut is withdrawn and the pay claim met in full. A victory for them would be a victory for all workers, and particularly the most exploited miners in Chile’s copper industry. But the miners need the solidarity of all other workers worldwide. They have no strike pay and are surviving on a very minimal income. They are totally reliant on donations and collections from other workers in order to maintain their fight.
Send messages of support to: luis.robles.operador@hotmail.es. Donations can be paid into the Banco Santander Banefe account 0-017-04-51614-9 in Chile or to the Royal Bank of Scotland, 127-128 High Holborn, London WC1V 6PQ. Pay Carlos Sanhueza (sort code: 16-00-37; account number 14155899).
Eleanor Davies
email
Drop the charges
The Partisan Defence Committee demands the immediate dropping of all charges against 26-year-old music teacher Helen Goddard, a victim of the government’s anti-sex witch hunt.
Goddard, nicknamed the ‘Jazz lady’ by her students, is due to be sentenced on September 21 in Southwark crown court under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for the ‘crime’ of having had sex with a 15-year-old female pupil. According to the Telegraph online, having admitted six counts of sex with the girl, who is under the age of consent, Goddard now faces a possible sentence of up to 14 years in prison and has been ordered to sign the Sex Offenders Register.
Goddard and the pupil at City of London School for Girls were involved in a close and sexual relationship - a perfectly natural thing that should be no business of either the school or the state. There is no suggestion from anyone, including the girl’s parents, that the sex was anything but consensual. Now Goddard’s promising career as a musician and teacher is in tatters. She has been thrown to the media wolves, both her and her partner’s personal lives violated.
The puritanical witch hunt against ‘sex offenders’ waged by the Blair and Brown Labour governments is a modern-day version of Christian fundamentalist crusades against ‘sin’. Adults engaged in inter-generational sex, especially between teachers and pupils, are treated as though they are de facto child rapists and murderers. The Sex Offenders Register is a witch hunter’s charter, containing thousands of names of totally innocent people - eg, some merely cautioned for possessing ‘dirty’ pictures - now blacklisted, stigmatised and worse for the rest of their lives.
State interference aims at regimenting society to conform to the mythical sexual ‘norm’ of one man on one woman for life, denying the complexity and variety innate in human sexuality. State repression will not alter the fact that children and teenagers develop sexual attractions towards other children and adults, including their teachers. ‘Age of consent’ laws giving the capitalist state the right to determine at what age youth can engage in sex are an invasion of privacy. The guiding principle in these matters should be that of mutual effective consent.
Drop the charges now!
Partisan Defence Committee
London
Prostitution
I see that the CPGB is in the process of redrafting its Draft programme. I will be interested to read whether there has been any change in its policy in regard of prostitution.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks had policies in relation to prostitutes. Lenin’s policy was to target the owners of brothels instead of the prostitutes who worked in them. The position of women in any society says a lot about that society. The growth in the number of prostitutes in the UK says a lot about the recession and the decline of capitalism generally.
Recent surveys have shown that over the last 20 years the proportion of men visiting prostitutes has risen from one in 50 to one in 25. Another recent survey shows that in Greater London there are more than 1,200 brothels, with an average of 20 brothels being advertised in the local newspaper.
Communists must have sensitive policies with regard to women in today’s capitalist society. This applies especially to those women offering ‘sexual services’. The decriminalisation of prostitution, together with an explanation of why some turn to prostitution as a way of avoiding the low wages that women are offered, would be a start.
In the communist society of the future prostitution would still exist, but the end of the law of value would result in prostitution being a lot less common than in present-day capitalist society.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
