WeeklyWorker

Letters

Libertarian

You are right to argue that the French government’s ban on the wearing of muslim headscarves and other religious symbols in state schools is oppressive and wrong.

Surely what we need is libertarian education. The state system in practice is just a big gulag - day prisons for the young. Their main purpose is to teach the majority of working class kids to fail. Any bureaucratic, state-imposed curriculum can end up being a totalitarian nightmare, as the French situation shows. And, the more money you throw at it, the more oppressive it gets.

Parents and communities should have access to the necessary resources and the opportunity to teach their kids at home or in the community if they choose. If they want to send them to schools, these should be independent and should set their own curriculums in cooperation with the parents and pupils.

Libertarian
Libertarian

Defend Yanar

Yanar Mohammed is the head of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and the editor in chief of the only progressive women’s newspaper in Iraq - Almosawat (Equality). As you know, she has recently received a death threat from islamists because of her effective activities against the violation of women’s rights and for equality and secularism.

Yanar’s commitment to change the situation for women, and her ideals for a better world, have been warmly received by the population at large in Iraq, Middle East and the world. Today, Yanar Mohammed is an international figure renowned for her humane ideals and courage. Her life and the principles she personifies must be defended.

The aims of the Committee to Defend Yanar Mohammed include:

You are invited to join the committee, sign our petition online (www.Petition-Online.com/Yanar/petition.html), write letters of protest to the US government, raise Yanar’s defence via resolutions in trade unions, send a donation, political parties, human and women’s rights organisations, and highlight the issue in the media by writing letters or articles.

Defend Yanar
Defend Yanar

Democracy Platform

As a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, I was dismayed to learn that John Bridge led a walkout by our contingent to the recent meeting of the Democracy Platform of the Socialist Alliance.

He gave the reason that the group decided to allow non-Socialist Alliance members to vote, and by doing so became an independent political organisation rather than a platform within the SA. As it happens, I think this is daft. The DPSA was formed precisely to oppose the anti-democratic, anti-socialist trajectory that the SA was being dragged into by the Socialist Workers Party. It aimed to defend the politics of People before profit, to campaign for democracy within the SA and to campaign for the creation of a new workers’ party. Some of those who left the SA did so precisely because they were unhappy with the SWP’s leadership, and were therefore natural allies of the platform. The DPSA should have organised all of those who supported its aims, including those who felt forced out of the SA by precisely the drift they were opposing.

However, this is not my main concern. Even if comrade Bridge was correct in opposing the opening up of the platform, he was wrong to walk out on losing the vote. Even if the platform had qualitatively changed its nature, it remained a united front of socialist organisations still committed to a democratic, partyist perspective that the CPGB has long supported. Indeed, throughout its sponsorship of the DPSA, our group has also been a member of the M3 committee, a group which brought together most of the same forces, but which was never tied to SA membership. The M3 included a number of groups and individuals who had met first on May 3 to organise support for democratic and partyist resolutions at the 2003 SA conference. It is true that the CPGB later argued that the M3 should wind itself up and concentrate on the DPSA, but it did not withdraw from membership on the ‘principle’ that it could not support a group which did not stipulate SA membership as a precondition of involvement.

Indeed, on this point comrade Bridge’s move seems singularly perverse. I have long argued that the CPGB should be playing an active part in building a campaign for a new workers’ party, and cooperating with other groups to do so: but the party has instead adopted a passive ‘wait and see’ approach to political developments. It was therefore left to Steve Freeman of the tiny Revolutionary Democratic Group to cohere the M3, and make strenuous and indeed heroic efforts not only to navigate a way through the political differences of its main sponsors, the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, but to involve others, such as Workers Power and the Socialist Party. The project was doomed by the lukewarm approach which united the CPGB and the AWL even when nothing else did, and the perspective that the M3 was, in any case, reduced to irrelevance by the DPSA. However, at precisely the point when the DPSA was taking on the wider, united front perspective of the M3, the CPGB walked out. Having described arguments over the SA as “haggling over a corpse”, it seems bizarre that we should suddenly attach absolute importance to the DPSA being purely a limb of that corpse.

Personally, I think that we are right to critically engage with Respect: the SWP remains the largest national revolutionary group, and Respect will win some support, given the absence of a genuinely socialist working class voice. I am also pleased that we have again begun addressing the issue of work in the Labour Party, which retains the affiliation of most trade unions and many individual socialists. But I remain convinced that we must work too with those who were or are supporters of the SA: the AWL, Workers Power, the Socialist Party, and those individual SA activists who remain committed to the project of building a new workers’ party based not around the petty sectarian ideology of an individual group, but the objective interests of the working class (and, through them, humanity) and the method of genuine, democratic centralism.

Democracy Platform
Democracy Platform

Draft query

The CPGB’s draft programme appears to contain incompatible demands on the issue of democratic rights.

Section 4.2 - the socialist constitution - states that “Supreme power in the state will be workers’ councils, composed of delegates who are elected and recallable at any time”. It’s the classic Marxist position on workers’ democracy, usually taken to mean that electors can instantly dismiss and replace their workers’ council delegates if they are unhappy with them. This suggests that if a majority of the electorate are dissatisfied with the performance of a representative, there would be a mechanism to enable them to remove him/her in between general elections.

But the same section of the draft programme then goes on to say that “Elections should be on the basis of proportional representation with an open count”. If we really do mean that delegates should be “recallable at any time”, surely this would subvert PR on the workers’ councils. The whole point of the PR electoral system, and presumably the reason why the CPGB advocates it, is that it ensures the representation of minority viewpoints in a democratic process.

Given that fact, who would have the power to recall an unsatisfactory delegate from a workers’ council? The majority of electors? Surely not, as this would simply enable them to replace the minority voices with that of the majority position and give frightening power to the strongest political parties in the new dispensation. The people who voted for a particular delegate? If we’re still using secret ballots, we wouldn’t know who had voted for that person.

If we simply mean that all delegates’ mandates would be renewed on a much more frequent cycle than that used by the current bourgeois democratic system - say on an annual basis - then it is possible to see how this might work: every delegate would face the possibility of being replaced pretty quickly if his/her constituents so wished. Pretty quickly, but not “at any time”.

Has this policy been fully thought out? Perhaps comrades could help me out with this one?

Draft query
Draft query

Bin Laden found

Two years, five months and nine days of the so-called ‘war on terror’. Billions of dollars spent invading and occupying two countries. Tens of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis and ‘coalition’ dead. And a German TV company found Bin Laden in Pakistan in less than a month!

Here is part of the TV company’s report: ‘How the Al Qa’eda chief is hidden and protected’: “Ever since the Americans bombed the caves of the Tora Bora mountains in southern Afghanistan, he has gone missing. All the secret services of the world cannot find the enemy No1 of the USA since 9/11.

“Really? Franco-Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui follows OBL’s trail through mountains, steppes and cities. He risks his life several times and films the governors of the terror network with a hidden camera - right up to the top of the Pakistani bureaucracy. Finally he finds the hideout of OBL, and the question arises: why does no one arrest the Al Qa’eda chief?”

This proves to me, without a shadow of a doubt, that this whole ‘war on terror’ thing is a fraud aimed at implementing the programme laid out by the neo-cons, and formulated by the Project for a New American Century. And, to make matters worse, the American media knows this documentary is coming out, and has known that for a while. My guess is that the Bush regime knows it, too. But neither one is even paying attention to it.

Again, more confirmation of the fraud that is the ‘war on terror’.

Bin Laden found
Bin Laden found

Reformist PRC

I don’t agree with comrade Becker’s ‘scepticism’ about the European Left Party (Weekly Worker February 19).

I’m a regional coordinator (in Florence) of the Marxist minority inside the Refoundation Communist Party (PRC) in Italy. We are fighting inside the party to stop the unacceptable stand that this reformist party is taking. And since this opportunistic party, left of Monsieur Le Capital, is planning to go back to the government in 2006 with the Olive Tree coalition of the technocrat Romano Prodi, I don’t see that the formation of this pathetic ELP party represents any step forward for workers’ interests.

It surely represents a step forward in the ruling class’s attempts to use the reformists to calm down the workers’ demands. I’d like to remind you that in 1997 the PRC voted in the Italian parliament for a labour law that introduced the legalisation of all kinds of ‘flexible’ work: jobs on call, temporary contracts without any guarantees, and so forth. And now they are asking the United Nations to go into Iraq!

The workers need a real revolutionary party. Maybe with a diversity of views, but with one clear strategy and programme on the side of wage workers all over the European Union. We don’t need a whining, moralistic party that begs the rich for some crumbs from the banquet.

Reformist PRC
Reformist PRC

Greek CP

In the Weekly Worker of February 19 there is an article about the so-called European Left Party that contains a reference to the position of the Communist Party of Greece around the issue. However, the reference does not reflect the position of our party in any way.

For the information of your readers, here is our letter to the United Left of Spain, dated September 19 2003.

“We thank you for the invitation you have extended to our party to participate in the meeting that will take place on September 21 concerning the European Left Party …

“Our party, according to its nature and character, was and is always open to initiatives promoting the coordination and common action on European level between communist and other radical left parties, always respecting the sovereign responsibility of each party for its own country. We consider that under the current conditions of growing imperialist aggressiveness in the context of the heightened capitalist crisis, of which the impact is obvious in all aspects of social life, as well as in the reactionary development of the EU, close cooperation and coordination are imperative.

“We strive to develop cooperation, rallying around specific topics of common interest, in order to support popular resistance and struggles. In this sense, we have supported and participated in many bilateral and multilateral initiatives taken by European parties ... Nevertheless, in our opinion, the debate under way about the founding of a European Left Party does not help in this direction.

“We consider that this project ignores the deep ideological and political disparities - even contrasts - in our parties’ points of view concerning: crucial issues of European unification and the European Union; the role of the present capitalist EU in international developments; programmes; the type of society we are fighting for; the overthrow of capitalism and the path towards socialist change; the role of political parties and anti-imperialist popular movements; the stance towards monopolies; the policy of alliances; the stance towards social democracy ...

“Ignoring this reality and endeavouring to create a single party would cultivate false expectations within the working people, and would disturb equity, sovereignty and independence that should characterise relations between the different parties. This will finally turn against all parties, and their commitments to their members and people.

“These developments have been triggered, among others, by the provisions of the European Union on the establishment of European parties. These European parties must explicitly accept the treaties of the EU and be subject to ratification and endorsement by the EU through concrete proceedings. This situation would lead to the elimination of essential elements referring to the independence and action of radical anti-capitalist forces. In fact, this event constitutes an intervention of the European Union in the political systems of the member-states, one that will also turn against the numerous movements contesting the European Union and its policies …

“As we have pointed out on other occasions as well, our Party, especially facing European elections, will undertake initiatives, and pursue the broadest possible cooperation within the frame of the European parliament, as well as outside of it against the policies of the European Union. We believe, however, that the discussion on the founding of a European Left Party gives rise to additional difficulties in the development of cooperation and common action that have been achieved so far. Consequently, dear comrades, our Party will not be able to participate in the meeting you are holding in Madrid on September 21.”

Greek CP
Greek CP

Open borders

The article ‘Respecting immigration’ is good enough (Weekly Worker February 12). But you make no reference to an article, book, etc where a reader can learn why and how the battle for open borders profits not just the worker abroad, but also the worker in the advanced capitalist country.

One must either explain or point the reader in the right direction. You must be convincing and tell how low wages in Poland or China depress wages in England and why an aggressive labour movement bringing into its ranks the immigrant, helping overseas organisers and so forth is an essential part of a communist’s duties.

Open borders
Open borders

Bible on marriage

Bible on marriage
Bible on marriage