Letters
G8 injured
As a result of actions by the Swiss traffic police as part of the repression of protestors against the Evian G8 summit on Sunday June 1, a UK national, Martin Shaw, has been severely injured and hospitalised.
The protestor, part of a 15-person international collective blockading a bridge in Switzerland to prevent G8 delegates passing from Geneva to Lausanne, was participating in a banner-drop with the slogan “G8 illegal”. Martin and another protestor, who doesn’t wish to be named, were hanging from both ends of the same rope from a 30-metre-high bridge over a small river alongside the banner.
Two traffic police arriving at the scene panicked about the build-up of traffic and cut the supporting rope of the two protestors despite repeated warnings about the danger of this from everyone present. The police later admitted to their actions in a press statement. Following this, there will be a judicial enquiry.
Martin currently remains in hospital in Geneva, where he has undergone an emergency three-hour operation on his vertebral injuries and ankles. The doctors have stated that his back will slowly recover, but it looks unlikely that he will be able to walk properly again as a result of his leg injuries.
Please send your thoughts on this despicable action by the police to your nearest Swiss embassy and help support Martin.
G8 injured
G8 injured
Wake up
I don’t think we should be too worried about who failed to turn up to a republican march (Letters, May 29). After all, what has Irish nationalism actually got to offer workers in Ulster?
I know that Phil Kent’s letter mentioned Sinn Féin’s lack of desire to protect a British-Irish minority in a united Ireland, but how likely are unionist workers to ever accept any reassurance? How exactly are republicans going to persuade them? A nice chat with Gerry Adams perhaps? I did not know that ‘demand the impossible’ was a communist as well as an anarchist slogan!
It is difficult to see why a British-Irish minority inside an Irish state would be less problematic than an Irish minority in a British state. Would there be riots and ‘armed struggle’ by unionists? Of course! We can start to remedy Ulster’s problems of discrimination against catholics now. And quite right too. Similarly, we can hope for a successful peace process.
A united Ireland? Forget it. Wake up to reality!
Wake up
Wake up
Independence
In contrast to what you argue in ‘Separatist road to Scottish socialism’, John Maclean called for a socialist republic (Weekly Worker April 24). Was he not a true socialist?
The existence of Scotland and Scotland’s right to self-determination are indisputable facts. Scottish independence should be as much a goal of socialists as Irish independence is. Both are a part of breaking up the monopoly of the rightwing British state.
Independence
Independence
Homesick
The now-strong housing market will hurt in the coming second recession. Those who got easy mortgage loans won’t be able to handle them. It will all ripple upward. Sad that your share portfolio is in a shambles? Glad your house is rapidly appreciating in value? Don’t be too glad. The housing boom is soon to go bust. And the way it will come to an end will affect everyone, even affluent homeowners.
The implosion will start among first-time homebuyers with few other assets. They support the whole housing market through the move-up chain, whose links are tenuous. What will burst the bubble? Don’t look for the usual suspects - interest rate hikes or overbuilding. Look instead for a second recessionary dip brought on by wealth losses and P45s, pressuring consumers to retrench.
As housing demand dries up, prices will fall and the whole mechanism will work in reverse. Those with big mortgages will see their equity wiped out, forcing them to sell, pushing prices still lower. Up to now, house appreciation has been offsetting share losses for many people. That helpful phenomenon will then be history. As already-rising dispossession rates go higher, lenders will withdraw. Bankers are reluctant to begin widespread foreclosures, a PR no-no, yet they surely will no longer be as loose with lending as they are today.
Homesick
Homesick
STWC sabotage
For the past six months the national Stop the War Coalition steering committee has systematically censored and sabotaged virtually all forms of direct action.
From the international significance of USAF Fairford, to the mass sit-down on the February 15 national demo, to the ‘Reclaim the bases’ weekend on April 5 and 6, the steering committee has used and abused the national email list and website to squeeze out, downplay or just plain censor these and many other actions.
The censorious agenda of the steering committee was most plainly exposed during the lead-up to the March 22 Fairford national demo. Stop The War groups around the country were telephoned by someone claiming to be from the national steering committee, who was spreading the message that Fairford had been cancelled. Whether this individual was genuinely from the steering committee is unclear, but the issue remains that the steering committee refused to use resources at its disposal to refute this sabotage, as it clearly suited their censorious agenda to allow Fairford to be damaged in this manner.
The steering committee has therefore made it absolutely clear that it has no intention of representing the full spectrum of opinions which make up the coalition, but only those opinions and actions they narrowly approve of. This is the definition of a hijacking, and that is exactly what has occurred.
The steering committee still has the opportunity to pull back from this active censorship and sabotage of the movement. If it does not, then the calls to bypass the steering committee will continue to grow.
STWC sabotage
STWC sabotage
Manic burn-out
Mark Fischer’s call to arms in support of the CPGB’s fundraising Summer Offensive doesn’t go nearly far enough in castigating comrades who refuse to give every drop of blood to the movement (Weekly Worker May 30).
Is it reformist weakness that means the CPGB has not yet started it own campaign of ‘exes’ (Bolshevik-style armed robberies) to raise funds? And what sort of amateurs don’t publish their paper abroad and then smuggle it in so as to practice for (their longed-for) working underground?
God forbid that people should do things other than full-time politics, like work long hours or have kids, relationships, etc, or spend money on petty bourgeois pursuits like foreign holidays. But then if you want to trundle along, never appearing to increase in size, burning out comrades through periods of manic activity, this is the tried and tested way to go.
I also knew a slightly deranged socialist in the 80s. This guy from the Workers Revolutionary Party found it harder and harder to sleep. I don’t know what kept him awake - worrying about his burgeoning paper debt, or the fact that his mattress was getting lumpier every day, hiding ever-increasing mounds of unsold News Lines from his comrades.
I also personally remember (shamefully) calling a comrade a ‘dilettante’ because she missed a conference to look after her sick mother. But then I was a very raw18-year-old and I sadly doubt that either of these people are still active socialists because of the unthinking regimes that they worked in.
It would be great for thousands of 18-year-olds, or any other age, to become revolutionary socialists, but that isn’t going to happen if they can only contribute by expending every moment of their free time or large slabs of their income in political activity.
I wonder what will be the look on the face of the Young Turks in the CPGB who unceremoniously show Mark the door for some future disagreement, and in spite of his years of hard work. Perhaps he will feel like he is looking in the mirror?
Manic burn-out
Manic burn-out
Stay divided
Educational standards have fallen to a pitiful level when basic arithmetic is beyond the abilities of your correspondents. As an irregular reader of the Weekly Worker I expect little more than gossip and an eclectic politics lashed together by the nebulous conception of partyism.
However, I do expect your correspondents to be able to count. Therefore I was amused to note that comrade Marcus Ström seems to believe that 25 comrades signed a resignation statement from the International Socialist Organisation in Australia (‘Shape of things to come’, May 29). In fact 21 comrades signed the document, which was published on May 25.
Were this the only error of fact in the article, we could pass it over with a smile. Yet Marcus also claims that the Socialist Alternative group is both anarchistic and ultra-left, and consists of some 90 members based in Melbourne. Happily this is not the case and SocAlt has recently grown considerably - to some 200 members - due to the disciplined interventions of its militants in the anti-war movement and on the campuses. It also engages in some limited work, where able, within the unions.
There is no ultra-leftism or anarchism. SocAlt stands firmly on the Marxist tradition on all questions in any of this work. Marcus is clearly either misinformed or does not understand this organisation and its ideas that he so blithely dismisses.
Marcus also discusses the Democratic Socialist Party, the largest tendency in the Australian Socialist Alliance and comments that it has not fallen for petty nationalism - along the lines, it is implied, of the Scottish Socialist Party, whose electoral successes it wishes to emulate, and indeed it has not. No, the DSP is happy to go the whole hog and has in the recent past embraced imperialist nationalism, as when it backed Australian military intervention in East Timor.
Nothing petty concerning this unprincipled stance, which Marcus passes over in a fashion I can only describe as curious, given that an article appeared in the pages of the Weekly Worker denouncing this reactionary capitulation to imperialism at the time. In fact the DSP is a former orthodox Trotskyist (sic) grouping, which has adopted many of the hallmarks of pseudo-Leninism - in fact an ideology fabricated by Zinoviev that is a left version of Kautskyism, that the Weekly Worker also espouses.
Marcus sees fit to argue that those comrades who have now left the International Socialist Organisation have done so because the formation of the Socialist Alliance has acted as a “democratic acid”, breaking down the “bureaucratic centralist” sectarianism of the ISO, which is described as a “micro-control organism”, no less!
The reaffirmation of the former ISO comrades to the International Socialism tradition is also described, obscenely, as comparable to the lip service made to Stalin by the victims of the great purge of the 1930s. This coming from a journalist on a paper which claims to be that of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a party which supported the purges, is a disgraceful lie. Despite too many years of political and organisational degeneration, the ISO and the allied Socialist Workers Party (Britain) remain opposed, formally at least, to the Stalinist politics and method which the founders of the Weekly Worker have never fully broken from.
The importance of a relatively small number of comrades leaving their organisation may not be clear for many socialists living in Britain, so it is worth explaining why events in the Australian left should concern us. Briefly the Australian left finds itself in a very similar situation to that here, although with significant differences. As here, the Australian left is faced with a bureaucratised union movement which is linked to a rightwing Labour Party. Although the formal link with the unions does not exist in Australia, the real linkages are more alive than here and the Labor Party not quite as rotten, and, as in Britain, a decaying milieu of ageing Stalinists retains some influence within the union bureaucracy. Again just as in Britain, the far left finds itself marginal to the workers’ movement and split into a multitude of competing groups.
Faced with the impasse of a low level of strike action and social struggles, the far left has sought ways to break out of its isolation and unity based on the lowest common denominator of electoral campaigning has appeared attractive to many. Given that the far left is divided into a myriad of competing groups, organisational unity is an attractive prospect for many. The relative success of the SSP also seems a path forward which merits emulation.
This unity of the assorted left groups, based on electoral work and little else, should be the beginnings of a ‘partyist’ project, according to Marcus’s schema. What kind of party this needs to be and what the nature of the politics it should fight for is left vague - as it must be if this sectarian schema is to gain any audience amongst the existing left, some token revolutionary phraseology being confined to the pages of the Weekly Worker at best.
In Australia the DSP has long participated in elections to no discernible effect within the working class and the opportunity to emulate the perceived success of the SSP provided them with the impetus needed to launch a Socialist Alliance. Their project was boosted by the turn of the ISO, the second largest far left group in Australia, to working in such an alliance, this turn being based on the rather over-optimistic basis that the 1990s was to witness struggles of a similar magnitude to those of the 1930s.
Such a perspective has since been seen to be as witless as SocAlt and others within the IS Tradition argued it was. Nonetheless the Socialist Alliance did draw in almost all the disparate groups and individuals of the far left in Australia and its success has been as minuscule as the Socialist Alliance’s in England and Wales. In short, the Socialist Alliance in Australia has been a dismal failure in its own electoral terms and as a project to construct a new mass workers’ party.
None of this has deterred the DSP, which dominates the Socialist Alliance in a fashion only marginally more democratic than the suffocating leadership of the Socialist Workers Party in England and Wales. The Socialist Alliance is then declared a success and steps are taken to convert it into a fully-fledged party, in which the affiliated groups will become factions. All this at the behest of the DSP and a grouping of independent members of the Socialist Alliance, who on closer inspection turn out to be close friends of the DSP and in many cases its former members.
This is what has precipitated the revolt in the ISO, as it has meant that tensions in that group, which arose as a result of the ‘1930s in slow motion’ perspective foisted upon them by our own SWP, have reached boiling point. Contrary to Marcus’s assertion that the comrades leaving the ISO will work within the Socialist Alliance, they have been united on little beyond opposition to the Socialist Alliance becoming a fully fledged miniature party. It is not then the “democratic acid” of the Socialist Alliance which has produced this rupture, but the failure of the Socialist Alliance to be anything other than an electoral front for its leading faction.
This has served to illustrate the failings of perspective and organisational structure, and the implied failings of democratic functioning, within the ISO. These same failings exist within the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales, where the SWP plays the leading role. Despite years of campaigning, the Socialist Alliance has won only a single council seat in its own name and its second largest component, the Socialist Party, has left in disgust at its non-democratic structures. In fact it has had far less impact at elections than the British National Party.
But, most importantly, the SWP’s rationale for joining the Socialist Alliance, which was that it would provide a political space for former Labour lefts and youthful anti-capitalists, has proven a fantasy. Its one legacy being that the alliance has campaigned on a platform, reformist in both form and content, far to the right of those adhered to by almost all its constituent parts.
Politically the alliance has proven to be far less than the sum of its parts. Having led the SA, a parody of the united front, away from any meaningful activity apart from electioneering, the SWP now plans to subsume it into a wider radical alliance with muslim obscurantists and via the remnant Communist Party of Britain with that wing of the trade union bureaucracy which reads the ‘Fading Star’ - a parody, if you like, of the popular front.
Stay divided
Stay divided