Letters

Unionist dupes

One of the central arguments of left unionists is that support for a ‘yes’ vote in the Scottish referendum is promoting anti-English chauvinism and racism. Not only did I reject this in my previous letter (June 12), but turned the argument upside down. The problem is unionism promoting the fear of anti-English racism in order build support for ‘no’ among the significant minority of English people living in Scotland. It is part of ‘Project Fear’.

Ian Donovan says: “It’s good that Steve Freeman has chosen not to brazenly defend his earlier, implicitly xenophobic smears against leftwing opponents of the SNP’s separatist referendum for Scotland” (Letters, July 3). Of course I deny any “xenophobic smears”. They were not “smears”. They were allegations. I am not defending allegations, rather explaining them again for those who either didn’t read them or didn’t understand them.

Not for the first time I have complained that Ian doesn’t read what I said. He avoids the words, “Scottish republic”, which is central to my argument. He only uses the word, “separation”, which I never used. He makes up what he thinks I could have said and then shoots down what he has attributed to me. He thinks I won’t defend my previous allegations against the British mafiosi about anti-English racism and chauvinism. Yet in my letter of June 26 I ended by saying: “The last point concerns Ian’s failure to understand the point about anti-English racism in the referendum period. I make (or made) no claim about how the situation may change after the result. I hope to comment on the ‘dark side’ of the ruling class on another occasion”.

Another occasion has arrived.Notice the words, “ruling class”, if you are offended by the term, “British mafiosi”. Their “dark side” is a reference to what the queen herself called “dark forces”. I am, of course, referring to MI5, one of the crown’s most powerful political organisations. Even Jack Conrad in identifying the British ruling class as unionist and loyalist did not mention them (‘Sinking loyalism and lifeboat nationalism’, June 26). MI5 was heavily involved in the miners’ strike and struggle in Ireland. What are they doing about this little matter?

Are they neutral - refusing to take sides, or perhaps going on holiday until October? I doubt it. Are they siding with the ‘yes’ campaign, biting the hand that feeds them, tearing up their oaths and commitments to the crown? I doubt it. The whole raison d’être for MI5 is the ‘defence of the realm’. They will be fighting the unionist cause with all the dirty tricks at their disposal.

It is highly significant that Ian did not mention them, much less their role in the referendum. Jack tells us the respectable unionist parties and the military establishment want nothing official to do with the UK Independence Party and the Orange Order. Ministers of the crown have their own covert ways of dividing and ruling, coordinated with their agents in the Daily Racist Garbage and the rest of the gutter press.

I am not saying that left unionists are paid agents of MI5. That would be a smear, not least because I have no evidence for making such a claim. The fact is their own economistic theories and false ideologies make them into willing dupes of the British ruling class. Look at George Galloway when he stood up to the ruling class over Iraq. Now see how far he has fallen, right into the cesspit of unionism, as he praises the heroic stand of the unionist billionaire, JK Rowling.

Greg Philo, a left unionist or unionist-socialist, wrote a piece on ‘Socialism and nationalism’, in which he identified anti-English racism. He says: “some incidents attracted a lot of attention, especially that of a disabled man being pulled from his car and attacked for having a union jack, and a young boy being punched in the street for having an England football shirt. The crucial point is that a rise in nationalist fervour is likely to intensify a divisive racism” (http://redpaper.net/page/2).

A Scottish government spokesperson said the number of incidents had actually fallen from 84 to 57. So who supplied Greg Philo with this information? He cites The Daily Telegraph (December 10 2013) as a source. The Telegraph reports: “The Tories highlighted Scottish government statistics showing that 5% of complainers or victims of racist attacks in 2012-13 were English.” Margaret Mitchell (Tory justice spokesperson) said she was worried that statistics demonstrated that anti-English feeling was on the increase north of the border ahead of next September’s referendum. She went on to say that “anti-English rhetoric doesn’t help”.

I have been at meetings where left unionist Sandy McBurney has tried to associate ‘yes’ supporters with anti-English racism. It is one of his main arguments. Its aim is to divide the left in England from the vast majority of the left in Scotland. It is using ‘fear of racism’ to divide people. Ian himself plays the same game. He says: “The nationalists are struggling to get the support they need and to do so they have to try to actively poison relations between the working class of Scotland and the rest of the UK. Their ‘left’ supporters have to help them in this task.” Physician, heal thyself!

Ian accuses me of “dog whistling”. I don’t know what he means, but I suppose he is accusing me of whistling at the dogs of unionism. These dogs have been barking too loudly for too long. They are very dangerous. If you doubt this go and watch the forthcoming Orange Order demo in Scotland.

Whistling our derision at the unionists is the least we can do - it is our solemn duty as internationalists. Now Scottish workers have a chance to do more than whistle by voting ‘yes’ against the British union on September 18. And if you are in England win the support of your friends and fellow workers for the ‘Scottish republic yes’ and build support for much greater democracy both sides of the border. Only then might a federal republic actually turn up.

Steve Freeman
Scottish Republic Yes tendency, Left Unity

Hipster

I think your regular correspondent, Alan Johnstone of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, is being a little ungenerous when he complains about his party not being mentioned by Jack Conrad even among the “Uncle Tom Cobley and all” left fragments (Letters, June 26).

Alan and the SPGB seem to have free and open space in the Weekly Worker to express their views on a fairly frequent basis. Just a short, wee while ago I recall Weekly Worker editor Peter Manson on the then forthcoming Euro elections advising workers in Wales “to cast a critical vote for the Socialist Party of Great Britain” and in the North West “to vote for the Socialist Equality Party” (‘Vote Tusc, vote left’, May 22).

I do not recall from exactly which putrid microbiological culture dish the SEP emerged from. And I am not particularly bothered. I just remember being told if you want to keep clear of ‘intelligence’ agencies from some very nasty foreign dictatorships, keep well clear of the WRP, its multiple splits and fragments, and its genetically spliced offspring. Alan and his comrades must be really pleased to have received the ‘critical’ vote of confidence from the Weekly Worker and to be listed among such ‘interesting’ sectlets as the SEP in this regard.

Incidentally, I note that Alan always signs his letters as being SPGB. Does this mean Alan always speaks on behalf of the SPGB, that his views are always the democratically and collectively determined view of the SPGB? I somehow suspect not. I sense Alan ‘shoots from the hip’ in his letter-writing, and then has to face a bit of a row back home over what he has written!

It’s all good fun, and leaves ‘our’ capitalist class quite untroubled ... which is the main thing.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Safely spaced

Now that the Weekly Worker has made itself clear about ‘safe spaces’, I should say that, while I’m in the middle, this professional worker is leaning towards (albeit very) critical support of that personal conduct policy. Your citation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany right wing’s anti-criticism stance might be taken as disingenuous (‘Bolshevism was not a safe space for opportunism’, July 3). The difference is that said stance was stated during a revolutionary period. Left Unity’s ‘safe spaces’ policy exists outside of such.

Again, this professional worker agrees that diplomatic criticism isn’t enough, but surely we should be capable of offering professional criticism, which is neither criticism-for-the-sake-of-criticism nor more amateurish forms, the latter including tiresome ad hominems and polemical slurs that only drive people away!

Professional criticism can be worded in ways like informed concerns, or alarms over another group’s lack of due diligence. Surely, this is the case in the time-tested-and-failed reform coalitionism strategy, an advocate of which you quoted (from the SPD right wing). We should be the ones internalising the political equivalent of due diligence as part of offering professional criticism. You write: “Naturally, this means trying to accurately represent the views of opponents, but pulling no punches.” I agree, but unfortunately I’ve observed more than enough of a fair share of personalised misrepresentations, so I also favour, outside revolutionary periods, counterabuse and counterbullying enforcement by personal-conduct ‘apparatchiks’.

Jacob Richter
email

Bad faith

I would like to reply to comrade Gupta (Letters, June 26) and Mr Lawton (Letters, July 3).

I never claimed to have met or have any inside knowledge about the Vicar of Rome. I merely note that a man who needs a bulletproof vehicle, whether he gets shot or not, is clearly lacking in faith. After all, whatever the outcome, it would be god’s will. Also, if comrade Gupta is ever successful in securing an audience with the purveyor of superstition, maybe he could ask for a little wealth distribution.

The comrade asks what other ideas I might have for “after the revolution”. Of course, all thoughts and ideas which are printed in the Weekly Worker letters page are merely hypothetical, as no-one can predict the outcome, although some ideas do receive overreaction from the more, shall we say, reactionary reader.

Some of my ideas include the replacement of the existing order and its buildings, palaces, castles, universities, monarchy, pomp and ceremony with high-tech places of learning and leisure centres, hospitals, housing, etc.

Throughout the world money would be abolished and replaced with working for the common good, where all citizens of the world would be free from border controls. They would work together to bring proper drinking water and decent food, education and build high-spec housing for all.

History would be taught from the workers’ point of view and not that of the kings and queens, so, yes, there would be a fair bit of book-burning. Comrade Gupta’s views on Marxism seem to suggest it’s where the few end up in the palaces quaffing champagne and looking at paintings of the last supper and the rest who are sidelined. That’s us, the real working class, who would be welcome to come out of our housing association hovels and marvel at the classical buildings and stately homes that the modern ‘Stalinists’ would now occupy, after which the workers could return to the factories.

I can visualise the bulldozers in Revolution Square, once known as Trafalgar Square, with no Nelson’s column. A voice would come from a megaphone directed at the National Gallery: ‘Would Lord Gupta and his pals please put down their glasses of champagne, come outside and join the workers in creating a brand new world? You have nothing to lose but your chains.’

Mr Lawton says: “It seems that Mr Roberts, as a self-described ‘revolutionary socialist’, stands for a war on religion. Yet he fails to tell us how bulldozing religious buildings (some of which are beautiful works of architecture and culture) relates to us achieving socialism - the abolition of classes.”

At the point of bulldozing religious buildings we would already be a long way to achieving socialism/communism, having already gained the majority either democratically (preferred option) or through armed struggle. The religious buildings are symbols of the oppressor, as are palaces and, of course, financial districts. The symbols of oppression must be removed as a huge psychological victory for the working class. The notion that some religious buildings are beautiful and of culture and should be kept is totally bourgeois.

Mr Lawton may need a more in-depth explanation and here I suggest he reads Nikolai Bukharin’s and Evgenii Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of communism, chapter 11, on ‘Communism and religion’ (www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/11.htm).

On a more personal note, I have no idea why he refers to “r-r-revolutionaries”, but must congratulate him on an excellent impersonation of Arkwright from the TV series Open all hours.

Tony Roberts
email

Purist

Reece Lawton’s criticism of Tony Robert’s ultra-left position on religion should be welcomed by everyone on the left (Letters, July 3).

However, when Lawton proceeds to criticise me, he fails to rise above dogmatism and avoids the issue. He is not interested in facts or experience, but only in doctrinal purity. This brings to mind the wise words: “A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be” (Albert Einstein).

What Einstein is saying is that theory is all very well and necessary, but in the end we have to follow the facts. For instance, no-one claims that Marxism calls for the persecution of religious people in its theory. However, in practice, Marxist-led revolutions have persecuted religious people in Russia, Spain and China, etc. Cuba seems to be an exception, but the leadership around Castro did not originate in the Marxist movement and the regime was able to survive the downfall of the Soviet Union and eastern European regimes, even though Cuba is only 90 miles off the coast of America. This would not have been possible if the Cuban leadership had the same attitude and practice towards the religious element in Cuba, which is a Catholic country, as traditional Marxist-led regimes displayed.

There is no call for the persecution of religion in Marxist theory, as Lawton recognises, but in practice it happened. Lawton doesn’t recognise that there is often contradiction between what people say and what they do. He claims I am unaware of the Marxist position on religion, and triumphantly declares that I have made a fool of myself. Lawton can say this because he defends what the Marxist position is on paper, but ignores practice. As an uncritical defender of Marxism, he is unable to comprehend my position when I argue that its attitude on religion is one way Marxism undermines the struggle for socialism. By its attitude, I mean not only how Marxists relate to religion and its supporters, but also the Marxist theory of religion, viewing it one-sidedly as a ideological product of class society, which implies that pre-class societies had no religion, while ignoring the metaphysical base of its origins. Thus, Marxists believe in the crude notion that, if people are well fed, live well, minus oppression, religion will fade away.

Lawton claims that I am a deluded liberal who “completely lacks an understanding of Marxism, yet is content to attack his own caricature of it”. This is rich, coming from a person who confuses theory with practice; rich indeed from someone who argues in his reply that socialism means the abolition of classes, an idea which is nowhere to be found in Marxist text. Finally, Lawton claims that communists cannot struggle for socialism successfully without Marxist leadership, but offers no proof of this theory. Such proof is necessary in view of the fact that most regimes claiming to be Marxist have collapsed. So, Mr Lawton, bring it on, if you dare.

Tony Clark
email

Looking tired

Last weekend the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty put on its annual summer school, Ideas for Freedom. The event attracted over a hundred people on Saturday July 5, from what I could see - not a bad turnout in the scheme of things, but probably worse than previous years. I went to a few different sessions from Saturday afternoon. It was fairly dull, but I managed to get into a couple of scraps with AWLers, which was reasonably instructive in itself.

I was not surprised that in the first session, on ‘Marxism and intersectionality’, Camila Bassi, the speaker on the pro-intersectionality side of the debate, managed to wheel out our very own Paul Demarty and his “terrible” article on the SWP crisis (‘Rape is not the problem’ Weekly Worker March 14 2013), as an example of the level of depravity socialism descends to when dominated by patriarchy. Looking at the article again, I cannot actually find the quote she supposedly took from it, but in any case the article describes feminism as a moralistic approach to politics, which adds nothing to Marxism’s own thorough understanding of women’s oppression rooted in concrete historical forces.

She presented a discussion based on Engels, Eleanor Marx and Claudia Jones, of a type which she said had never appeared in the Weekly Worker - because we do not understand our own Marxist-feminist history, apparently. I pointed out how wrong this was, and asked her to clarify what she actually disagreed with in the Demarty article, but the response was pretty indignant: “How dare he tell me about feminism!” she repeated a couple times. The speaker from the AWL, Kate Harris, was fairly spot-on in describing intersectionality as a consciously anti-Marxist strain of thought that is based in the academy for the most part. However, this obviously calls into question the AWL’s active courting of this political milieu in the student movement - no doubt for opportunistic reasons.

The organisers did not feel the need to put on an AWL speaker in the session on Ukraine. Instead they handed it over to the duo that has been doing the rounds on the most pro-Maidan wing of the left - Chris Ford and his contact in the Ukrainian Left Opposition, Zakhar Popovych, who spoke over a very bad Skype connection. Some of the points made were convincing enough. That there was some kind of popular element at the beginning of the protests is clearly correct, and the antics of the Stalinist left have been ridiculous - specifically the sacking of, and refusal to publish articles by, a journalist in the Morning Star, because his reports contradicted the line that Maidan was purely a reactionary movement.

Even so, the AWL speakers in the room took this way too far, and really began to question whether calling some of the elements in the Ukrainian government fascists at all was even “useful”. Even Popovych corrected this, stating that there were certainly dangerous fascist elements in the administration. (Martin Thomas of the AWL attended this session, by the way. He was sporting a T-shirt bearing an Israeli flag and a Palestinian flag side by side, above the slogan, “Two states. One future!”, on the back and “Shalom!” - the Hebrew for ‘peace’ - on the front. It felt quite incongruous, given the Israeli bombardment and collective punishment of Gaza over the last week.

The last full session I went to was on the radical left after the SWP crisis. The AWL had managed to reel in Simon Hardy, who is national secretary of the almost dead International Socialist Network. He seems to be in danger of leaving a trail of defunct left organisations behind him, having wound up his Anti-Capitalist Initiative a few months ago. Prominent AWLer Ruth Cashman related to me afterwards that it would have been impossible to get other ISNers who actually represent the group’s politics better, like Paz Thomson, because they consider the AWL too politically toxic to touch with a barge pole.

But Cathy Nugent, the editor of Solidarity, the AWL’s paper, insisted that there was a need for activists to “know what they were for”, and be able to offer “vision” - it was not enough to simply be populists or anti-capitalists. There was also a need for firm, principled politics, she said. She praised Simon Hardy and others like him for their job of constituting the “hard left” of Left Unity, which she thought was important. This was obviously too ridiculous to take seriously. She talked about political timidity, but at the same time insisted the AWL was not getting involved in Left Unity in a big way because it had “other more important priorities”.

I said that I thought this was basically baloney, and that the AWL was too politically timid itself to engage seriously in the debates in Left Unity because of the likelihood of it being taken apart over its flagrant social-imperialism. For this I was roundly denounced by the assembled AWLers, who were particularly incensed because the CPGB had tried to expel the AWL from LU’s Socialist Platform last year. Cathy obliquely referenced this incident as another reason the AWL were steering clear. I pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of the AWL signing a statement which contains a clause categorically opposing imperialist interventions - which was why we thought comrades who agreed with the AWL line on, say, Iraq and Libya should not have been allowed to join the SP. For this both I and the CPGB in general were condemned by everyone else in the room for telling “lies” about the AWL’s position on the occupation of those countries.

To me, the AWL senior and middle cadre are looking a little tired, as though they are just going through the motions. They seem to be courting softer targets like comrade Hardy in the regroupment milieu, but without any visible success. I can’t see them doing anything significant at present.

Daniel Harvey
London