Letters
Ridiculous Sparts
Of all the far left probably the group that had the most shameful policy in the last elections were the Spartacists. They campaigned for a vote against Labour and the Socialist Alliance, and for the Socialist Labour Party.
In Workers Vanguard they justified their position by saying that the SA did not call for revolution or for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland. They said the SA didn?t want to stand candidates in non-safe Labour seats (like Corbyn?s Islington), and that the alliance advocated a vote for Labour in constituencies where the SA didn?t contest.
But the SLP did not call for revolution either and the SA did demand troops out. The SSP stood candidates in all Scottish seats. The SLP did not compete against Corbyn itself. Some components of the SA (SWP and WP) advocated a critical vote for Labour in the rest of the country, while the CPGB and SP did not. In some places the SP organised candidates against ?left? Labourites, yet the Sparts rejected voting for them.
The Sparts are always trying to find the most ridiculous pretexts for sabotaging the left. They supported Scargill?s witch-hunts and now they prefer to vote for a small sect whose second-in-command is an apologist for Stalin?s murder of Trotsky.
Ridiculous Sparts
Ridiculous Sparts
Oh insults
If Darrell Goodliffe wants to insult Anti-Fascist Action by accusing them of lacking ?joined up? politics he needs to come up with a more detailed anti-fascist alternative than saying ?we must critically address many issues? (Letters, August 2).
Afa has been ?critically addressing? the issue since 1994 when the BNP change of strategy kicked in - not that many on the left appear to have taken any notice. Before the BNP ?ceasefire? in 1994, ?no platform? meant physically disrupting fascist activities. Nowadays the Anti-Nazi League uses the same slogan to demand the state ?jail all nazis? or ban their activities. The ?success? of this strategy can be seen by the recent victories the BNP has had, after threatening legal action, in forcing the BBC and Birmingham council libraries to remove their bans on internet links to the BNP website. The endless call for fascist bans has inevitably led to the ANL themselves being banned in Birmingham, Burnley and Oldham, and two Labour MPs have suggested the ANL bans should be made more permanent. Where now for the ANL?
Tommy Sheridan MSP resorts to lies about the BNP vote actually going down, the Socialist Alliance claims their poor showing in the general election was actually a great success, and still ?comrade? Goodliffe writes that Afa ?confuse the issue?, when, as far as I can see, they are the only ones with any grip on reality. With the prospect of the BNP winning council seats in May 2002 there needs to be a sense of urgency about the left. We can study exactly how the far right are able to ?fill the political vacuum? in working class areas by looking at Europe; and we can also see from the evidence before us that the ANL?s claim that Le Pen and Haider would never have made the breakthrough into the mainstream if anti-fascists in those countries had followed their lead as being complete nonsense. So if the ANL?s anti-fascism isn?t working (and I wait with interest to hear anyone say different), and Afa?s strategy is full of ?serious contradictions?, what do you suggest?
And this time round a BNP breakthrough will be far more serious than the Isle of Dogs in 1993. Now we are into the second term of an anti-working class Labour government, the left is still alien to the majority of working class people, and the fascists (or should I say ?post-fascists?) are now in government in Italy as well. It is not as if we are winning!
In Europe there are essentially two types of anti-fascism: liberal protest groups and the more confrontational ?black bloc? type organisations. Neither of these has made any impact on the working class constituencies where the far right have done well. What Afa are trying to do, uniquely, is to develop a new strategy that is actually designed to confront the strengths of Euronationalism. Rather than denounce this radical project as ?fruitless activity? Mr Goodliffe would do well to listen and learn.
After all, Afa warned of the divisive nature of multiculturalism long before the riots in Oldham, Burnley or Bradford, and long before others on the left began to look at it more critically. Similarly Afa predicted that if the working class communities where asylum-seekers were housed were treated with hostility and contempt this would replace class as the dominant factor with race. The recent murder of an asylum-seeker in Glasgow makes the popular leftwing slogan ?Refugees welcome here? look as absurd as it really is.
And finally, if Darrell Goodliffe believes everyone who votes BNP should be dismissed as ?plebeians and lumpenised elements? it only goes to show how little he knows.
Angry? You bet.
Oh insults
No breakthrough
Am I alone in thinking that, although the Genoa demonstration was an impressive show of working class militancy and the growth of the anti-capitalist movement more generally, commentary on the events in Socialist Worker are unfortunate, heralding the event as the breakthrough for the left, overblowing its significance somewhat?
The instability historically of Italian capitalism has seen a succession of one crisis government after another, annual general strikes and significant fascist organisation used from time to time to batter working class militants. A demonstration of 300,000 in Italy is not the same as 300,000 in the UK in terms of significance. The demonstration has not been a battering for the Italian government.
The anti-capitalist movement needs to be developed and organised with an orientation towards the working class and armed with revolutionary vision. Simply heralding every demo as the best thing since sliced bread may warm despondent SWP members, slugging it out in sleepy Britain, but it does little in terms of developing a sober analysis.
No breakthrough
No breakthrough
Divide and rule
In the post-election Socialist Alliance, local alliances are discussing how best to organise. Many of these alliances are quite new and many are also predominantly made up of majorities from the Socialist Workers Party.
SWP members have by and large been calling for larger alliances to be broken up along constituency lines. In Southwark there was an attempt to break up into two smaller alliances. In East London, Elsa was broken up into three local alliances.
What is behind this? Take East London for example. Within Elsa as a whole there was a substantial minority of activists from other left groups: CPGB, Workers Power, AWL. Within the three smaller alliances, this political counterbalance is divided and smaller.
The SWP has changed its structure. No longer does it have local weekly ?Can we have a revolution in Britain?? meetings. Instead, regional SWP organisers have told members to see themselves as caucuses at the core of a number of campaigns: Globalise Resistance, Socialist Alliance, CND, Committee to Defend Asylum-Seekers, Anti-Nazi League, etc. By breaking up the larger alliances, the SWP caucuses are more easily able to exert hegemony. It is an undemocratic move.
Comrades who were in the Socialist Labour Party may remember that Arthur Scargill and his then henchmen, Pat Sikorski and Brian Heron, broke up larger SLP branches in order to divide opposition to their bureaucratic rule. They forced through the break-up of South London SLP and tried to move to constituency parties. Sound familiar?
While the intent of the SWP may not be so sinister, the effect is the same. Divide and rule. While we do need local and effective activist bodies, we also want to bring numbers of comrades together to discuss politics, theory and practice.
Divide and rule
Divide and rule
Slaves marching
As always with communist propaganda, when opposing the enemy your paranoia blames both the state and the anarchists for your defeat, and with great lack of originality you now claim without proof that the police are donning masks and throwing bricks.
Marx once accused Bakunin of being a secret policeman, so nothing changes there with your attempts to ?black bloc? those activists who possess more vitality and energy than the theorists and moral blackmailers that wish to coordinate resistance.
Genoa was a defeat. Do you honestly believe that men such as Blair, Bush, Putin and the rest were impressed by the sight of thousands of slaves marching up and down the streets with their colourful banners and costumes? No political decisions will be influenced by the marches. The politicians and the multinationals will continue to drain away human liberty like the parasites that they are, and the resources of this planet will be further depleted.
Because I love the ideal of liberty I could never love Leninist bureaucrats, but I would have more respect for you if you at least showed some initiative. But, since you are a party that throughout its existence has been nothing more than a gaping mouth for Soviet funds, you are probably hoping that by staying small nobody will notice you enough to finish you off.
The planet will not be freed by non-violent protest. By doing nothing you further empower the state.
Hope you survive. Ha!
Slaves marching
Slaves marching
Who needs enemies?
Class War condemns the recent issue of the Weekly Worker . It is no more than a call for authoritarian terror against anarchists, with your definition of ?anarchist? including any communists who aren?t Leninists, Stalinists or Trotskyists.
Your front page calls impotently for the whole European working class to ?act now? and we all know if that was possible we?d be in a near revolutionary situation - not the situation of class weakness and division we presently suffer. As if the Italian ruling class give a toss. We agree that the working class needs its own militia to police itself (and in the past have articulated this: for example, see our former theoretical magazine The Heavy Stuff). Your demand for such sounds like a three-year-old stamping its feet. You are at best Toy Town revolutionaries whose absurd calls for the state or the class to do this or that are as meaningless as your claims to represent true communism.
Genoa was not your demonstration, so how can it be hijacked? It?s you and your tendencies that have tried hijacking May Day/anti-capitalism protests (for the original Weekly Worker position on these protests, see the June 24 1999 issue?s rant against, where the movement is described as one for bourgeois liberals). Not that political consistency can ever be found in your pages - one week Ken Livingstone is described as a potential dictator and fascist; the next you are campaigning for him to become London?s mayor (March 9 2000 et al). Which way is the weather vane pointing this issue?
Given your irrelevance and non-participation in the anti-capitalist movement until it struck a chord with the capitalist media?s headlines, nobody in the movement was bothered about you one way or the other until you started threatening violence against genuine protesters (that?s not saying the odd hothead needs dealing with - usually for their own safety). This sort of macho crap is the reason why some insurgents in Northern Ireland spend almost as much energy killing one another as attacking the British state.
Silvio Berlusconi gave carte blanche to the Italian police. The sort of policing common in Turkey, Colombia and (in the past) Chile and Northern Ireland was dished out. The activities of the black bloc, you may argue (although we would disagree), gave political justification for this after the event, but certainly did not contribute to the beating police gave out - the less resistance, the more people would have been beaten up. Indeed your own correspondent, Andy Hannah, conceded: ?They [the police] went for a pre-emptive strike.?
Berlusconi has had to pay a political price and the reason why some liberals have condemned the police is that the Italian authorities have upped the ante. The black bloc behaviour has not been considered to have upped the ante by anyone except the Leninists (ie, you and the SWP) for your own opportunist political reasons. Having climbed on the back of the anti-capitalist movement, you (and for that matter the SWP) see the chance to grab the rudder and toss everybody else overboard. Not a chance.
You claim that Thomas Harding (Daily Telegraph journalist) infiltrated the Wombles, who?d organised the riots. In fact Harding?s article said the opposite, that the Wombles didn?t organise the punch-up with the police. In fact it tried to stop them (to their shame in Class War?s opinion). In practice Harding?s infiltration was of little significance. Indeed you choose not to even mention the journalist who quite comfortably infiltrated Globalise Resistance?s train trip to Genoa.
The Bolshevik tradition has a fine record of being infiltrated by the tsarist secret police. The Russian biographer of Stalin, Radzinsky, has even claimed Uncle Joe was at one stage a police asset. Of course, there?s going to be police agents. Can you tell us there?s no police agents in the SWP or even the CPGB? Bolshevik cells were manipulated to some extent by the tsarist secret police. The Wombles are a democratic group, although you have to be active to have a say - that is good practice, and although Class War has criticisms of the Wombles, that does not make their actions counterproductive. As we saw them in action at May Day, we consider them brave and self-disciplined comrades.
You try to ridicule the anarchists for having ?split right down the middle during their first big test?. Well, you Leninists are split into 57 varieties before any test! Physician, heal thyself! The black bloc is not a sect-like organisation, but a collection of like-minded activists who believe there is nothing morally wrong in confronting the police/state and if our demonstrations are to have dignity we have to stand up to police intimidation when the opportunity arises. They dress in black for security which dates back to the 80s demos when lots of punks wore black as a lot of Bohemian types always have. (They were a large part amongst those who were prepared to defend the demos from the police.)
If police agents provocateurs created false black blocs in Genoa, it is the police you should be condemning, not anarchists. As Dave Douglass has pointed out, similar stunts were pulled here in the miners? strike, but you did not condemn the NUM for the state?s crimes! If the Weekly Worker were an effective bloc on street demonstrations do you not think similar tactics would be used against you?
You ridicule (rightly) the SWP?s talk of breaching the ?red zone? (it was anything but a red zone), but at least Ya Basta were serious, unlike your Leninist posturing. What?s the point of going hundreds of miles and then standing around meekly? We were at demos in the early 80s with probably 100,000 on them and all they got was a paragraph in the broadsheets. It is anarchist tactics that have made the demonstrations on May Day/G8 newsworthy; and then you parasites come along. At the time you attacked the slogan ?anti-capitalism?, although through it we moved on the politics of such demonstrations which previously had at best been the ?back to bicycles? of Reclaim The Sreets. Sadly, we still have to put up with whining christians and upper class tossers like George Monbiot telling us we aren?t really protesting about our own exploitation but that third world dictators aren?t allowed into the same politicians? club as George W Bush and co - still, at least they pissed off after the petrol bombs started flying.
Your po-faced whining about anarchists ?setting ablaze dozens of cars, looted offices and fire-bombed a bank, disregarding the flats above? is laughable. Be consistent - you?d better start condemning Asian youths around the UK and people in Belfast who have done the same this year! Anyhow, on this one we?re with Durrutti. You say such acts are no more than ?the expression of rage by a frustrated section of society?. So what?s wrong with that anyhow? As long as they don?t get caught, we call it the carnival of the oppressed. Is your complaint that we?re not about an ?alliance of various churches and charity campaigns around economic issues?? Start recruiting your nuns, comrades.
You go on to claim that you are the best revolutionaries, as you went on the most demonstrations, and complain the anarchists chose to save their strength/not reveal their cards till the Friday. Well, perhaps they considered it was a pinko-liberal demo and didn?t hijack it. To you it?s all about selling papers and bossing people around - we?ve already got bosses and don?t need any more.
Next we come to Ms Becker: you?ve whined about being trapped in Oxford Circus on May Day because ?anarchists? led you there from the World Bank - well, we were there running free through the streets of Soho! Only sheep blindly follow, Ms Becker. Where?s your so-called Bolshevik leadership? - following the crowd is no excuse for you.
Mark Fischer tries to conceal your Leninist/Stalinist tendencies by trying to find justification in Marx. You find some obscure text - well, face it, it?s not exactly Das Kapital or the Communist manifesto - that is, a critique of the Blanquist secret societies, a movement that based its method of organising on the secret societies of the American and French revolution and the United Irishmen - revolutions that incidentally were more successful than the proletarian revolutions that we aspire to.
Marx describes in this text the class of professional conspirator as a part of the lumpen-Bohemian of society. Does that sound familiar? As far as we can see, what you call cadre, your revolutionary knights, are no more than professional conspirators who have alienated themselves from working class society, if they ever knew it in the first place.
So to your interview with Tom Behan. He and Globalise Resistance are SWP sectarian/authoritarian scum. We should more accurately talk of SWP-ANL-GR, as they are all one and the same. The main complaint from SWP members we have heard about the black bloc is that the SWP got more of a beating - thus somehow proving the black bloc were in league with the police. To Class War it proves fighting back collectively with those you have confidence in is better protection than Gandhian pacifism. All the meek deserve to inherit is a good beating. There never will be a militant demonstration that does not suffer from police intimidation.
As for his comments, we?ve seen this sort of shit in the pages of the Evening Standard and other papers, talking of fascist infiltration of left/anarchist demos the police do not like. Needless to say, no evidence of this is produced. In fact, we know it hasn?t happened in Britain, as we have plenty of activists who can spot their people. The last time a known fascist tried to get into the Anarchist Bookfair - Jamie Demayo in 1998 - he left head first. The very same Mr Demayo attended Marxism 97 and the Workers? Liberty 1997 day school completely unchallenged. But the SWP-ANL-GR and Behan are quite prepared to repeat state-sponsored lies.
One noticeable characteristic of the SWP and their fronts is that they constantly talk the language of war - fighting the Nazis, smashing the bill, victory in Genoa, etc, while doing nothing to protect those who get caught up in the violence at their own demonstrations, be it Welling, Bradford or Genoa. People in glass houses ?
Politically these are changing times on the left. A shame then that you are so trapped in the failed dogmas of the past. Leninism is a political movement of the last century, not this. You talk of the need for a European-wide Socialist Alliance, but, perhaps thankfully, you can?t even build an England-wide SA! This is in part because of your attitude to anyone on the left who does not accept your right to pronounce authoritarian Leninist diktats. This is why the SA has such a problem in becoming a left umbrella. If it did you would presumably try to get it to do the state?s dirty work and physically attack the anti-capitalist movement!
Finally and most seriously, we turn to your disgraceful obituary of our dead comrade, Carlo Giuliani. It says much about the Weekly Worker that you attempt to pin the blame for his murder not on the Italian police, or even Berlusconi, but in part on anarchists. By your logic, after Bloody Sunday the Weekly Worker should have blamed the republican movement for throwing stones at the army after being told to disperse, or the ANC for the Sharpeville massacre.
That Carlo was a life-long anarchist is of course kept from your readers. That he received more respect in his death from the Daily Mail tells revolutionaries all they need to know about you.
Who needs enemies?
Genoa condemnation
While the Pinochet-style repression in Genoa has provoked outrage throughout Europe and the world, the CPGB seems more intent on faulting the black bloc anarchists than denouncing Berlusconi and the G8.
It is true that any serious Marxist would want to point out, as you do, that tactics like trashing shops and picking fights with vastly more powerful police are no substitute for mass action by the working class, and will end up hurting protesters more than their enemies. Such criticisms, however, should be presented as differences among revolutionaries over the most effective methods of fighting our mutual enemy, the capitalist state; they should not lend themselves to being confused with the indignation of liberals and social democrats, who abhor the ?violence? of the black bloc out of reverence for the existing order and its rules.
The Weekly Worker, however, fails to make clear the standpoint from which it opposes the anarchists. Tina Becker takes the Socialist Alliance and Workers Power to task for merely criticising - as opposed to condemning - the black bloc. Now ?condemnation? is a term of moral disapproval, suitable for enemies, not for fellow revolutionaries with whom one disagrees. When anyone goes beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, it is to be expected that professional opinion-makers will attempt to split the movement by pressurising more ?moderate? elements to dissociate themselves from the ?lawbreakers?: ie, to ?condemn? them. WP and the SA were right in their refusal to employ any language that could be construed as succumbing to this pressure, whatever the other defects of their attitude towards Genoa.
The fact that the black bloc may have been heavily infiltrated by the police, or that their tactics may lend themselves to infiltration, makes no essential difference. Agents provocateurs have always been present in our midst, but anarchists act provocatively, or stupidly, not chiefly because government agents dupe them into it, but because they are young, marginalised and enraged.
The ambiguity of your stance is even more serious in the obituary for Carlo Giuliani, the young anarchist murdered by the Italian police. You write: ?As a result of the rightwing-fascist coalition government?s hard-line attitude to ?subversives? coming to demonstrate in Genoa and the irresponsibility and provocative behaviour of the anarchists, Carlo has been lost to the cause of revolution and human liberation? (emphasis added). It?s hard to read this sentence as meaning anything but the equal apportionment of blame to the Italian state and the anarchists for Giuliani?s death.
There can be no such moral equivalence. Carlo Giuliani and his comrades acted out of justified anger against the ravages of capitalism in its current neo-liberal version. The Italian police were defending the ravagers. Criticism that does not situate itself in regard to this fundamental distinction leaves itself open to suspicion.
Genoa condemnation
Genoa condemnation
Cowardly pacifists
Under the guise of a polemic against Worker Power, Mark Fischer launches a frontal attack on the direct action tactics used by the anti-capitalist movement in Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa and elsewhere (?Workers Power?s anarchist wobble?, July 26). In doing this he reveals how rightist the CPGB is.
He attacks WP?s arguments for properly organised defence squads if demonstrations are to achieve their aim of disrupting the imperialists? summits: ?The notion that we should set as an aim of our protests full-scale confrontations with the armed might of the state?s paramilitary forces is insane.? His alternative? ?Rather than potential massacres, the workers? movement should organise mass peaceful demonstrations ...? (his emphasis).
In this Mark Fischer and the CPGB are in complete agreement with the reformist leaders of the workers? movement; of Rifondazione Comunista, the CGIL, the Democratic Left, as well as the Greens and NGOs - all of whom wanted symbolic peaceful protests. The anti-capitalist youth, on the other hand, want to stop these summits ?by any means necessary?. Why? Because they know it?s where the imperialists complete their plans to exploit, and drive into abject poverty, the masses of Indonesia, Africa, Asia, etc. Revolutionaries fully support such direct action.
In Seattle ?taking on the might of the state?s paramilitary forces? helped paralyse the WTO meeting. It emboldened the ?third world? leaders to stand up to the outrageous demands of the imperialists. It plunged the WTO into a crisis it has yet to recover from. In Genoa it was the sacrifices of the anti-capitalist fighters in the face of a carabinieri onslaught, including the tragic death of Carlo Giuliani, which helped bring 300,000 workers and youth onto the streets on Saturday. Again it was the direct action and the state?s response which swung international opinion against the G8.
Of course direct action, properly defended demonstrations, anti-arrest squads are not sufficient - but vitally important on the day. WP put out tens of thousands of leaflets arguing the need to link the struggle to the workers? movement, to fight to call a general strike in Genoa and in Italy. Only the power of the workers of Genoa could have really paralysed the summit, only removing the ?peaceful? leaders of the RC and CGIL could get it. But to support peaceful demonstrations against the anti-capitalist protests is to line up with these reformist misleaders.
The Weekly Worker observer mocks Chris Bambery for attempting to climb the red zone fence. Carlo Giuliani?s life was ?sacrificed needlessly as part of a misdirected street battle?. It?s time WP ?grew up?. Comrades, the members of the SWP, of Ya Basta, of WP and Revolution showed a hundred times more revolutionary courage than is shown by the CPGB.
Your ?intervention? at Genoa consisted of sending half a dozen scribes to wander around observing different parts of the action in order to write sneering pieces for the Weekly Worker. You treat the anti-capitalist movement with the contemptuous disdain of passive propagandists. Your cowardly and pacifist line on Genoa should be treated with the contempt it deserves by the anti-capitalist and the workers? movement.
Cowardly pacifists
Cowardly pacifists