Letters
Record check
Far from being in the fast lane to extinction, International Socialist Network members are “dancing”, according to the letter signed by several comrades in last week’s letters page (July 31). The comrades doth protest too much, methinks. Let’s dig out the Socialist Workers Party 2013 split check list and have a run through, shall we?
A refusal to deal seriously with their own highly problematic political lineage, or the crippling disunity of the left, in favour of launching yet another sect? Check.
Like Minerva from the head of Jove, or Buddha emerging painlessly from the side of Brahmavati, the ISN declares itself to be yet another (drumroll, please) ‘network of activists’, who presumably just bumped into each other one day by accident. A political platform almost identical to Socialist Worker’s infamously minimalist ‘What we stand for’ column? Check (appendix I of the ISN’s third interminable bulletin).
A sudden awakening to the fact that we don’t live in the 1970s, and that “many of the basic building blocks of post-war working class power and working class strategy in the 20th century are in terminal decline”? Check. As the comrades have only recently emerged from SWP-land, where the workers’ state is always just around the corner, they could be excused for having only just noticed. But implying that Dan Harvey - or any of the Weekly Worker’s regular contributors - are ignorant of this decline is not a rebuttal which holds any water.
Despite this reality check, or perhaps because the real tasks seem insurmountable, the comrades seem determined to draw all the wrong lessons from the SWP crisis. By some sort of infant-bathing ju-jitsu, they are managing to throw out the baby of partyism and rigorous Marxist analysis, while simultaneously dousing themselves with the dirty bathwater of programmatic economism and bureaucratic centralism. If anything, the rhetoric of how society has changed is being used as cover while oozing to the right; although the ISN - like its older, but similarly sickly sibling, Counterfire - are really just following the SWP’s politics to their logical conclusion.
The comrades may be dancing, but we’ve heard this record enough times already.
Adam Jensen
email
Crown agents
In a previous letter I said: “The British ruling class have billions to be protected. They have many ways to stir it up and much skill and practice from empire days. They have the secret role of the security services, the mouthpiece of the BBC and all the rightwing press. People like Jeremy Paxman and left unionists like George Galloway and Greg Philo may or may not be innocent dupes in this game” (June 12).
So the British ruling class have a “game” and unionists like Paxman, Galloway and Philo may or may not be innocent dupes. But Ian Donovan misquotes this to claim I am smearing them as “tools of MI5” or even “conscious agents” (Letters, July 31). I did not say what Ian claims. I have no way of knowing whether these dupes of the ruling class are “innocent” or, as Ian says, “tools of MI5” or “conscious agents”. If Ian has any facts they would be more useful than his moral outrage.
Ian misrepresents me in other ways. When he repeats the quote above he adds his own insert: “They [ie, the official ‘no’ campaign] have the secret role of the security services, the mouthpiece of the BBC and all the rightwing press ...” In fact I said “The British ruling class” and“They”refers to this class, not, as Ian claims, “the official ‘no’ campaign”.
I said MI5 is a political weapon of the British ruling class. MI5 promotes ‘no’. Ian tries to avoid this. He implies that, except for a few pro-unionist renegades, they are no more than bureaucrats - neutrals or abstentionists - because they don’t want to take sides or don’t know which way to go. Sorry, Ian, they know exactly which side their bread is buttered on.
MI5 will be backing the ‘no’ campaign in multiple ways. We know there are paid crown agents (MI5 and Special Branch) across the trade union and socialist movement. Unless we are crown agents ourselves, we do not know who or where they are. Yet we can predict that they will be active in all camps.
Crown agents will be promoting ‘no’ in the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. In England, outside the Labour Party, for example in Left Unity, there is resistance to ‘no’. So they will encourage neutrality, sitting on the fence, etc. For the ruling class this is the second best option. MI5 will reason thus - if you can’t be ‘no’, at least have the decency to be neutral.
The aim of crown agents is to separate the working class in England from the militant anti-unionist socialists in Scotland. But, of course, they will also be amongst the ‘yes’ campaigners doing what they can to sabotage all efforts to spread the anti-unionist message.
I alleged that it is in the interests of the British ruling class during the referendum campaign to promote the fear of anti-English racism in Scotland and England to do two things - frighten English people in Scotland to vote ‘no’ and divide the English and Scottish left.
Innocent dupes promote the British ruling class ‘no’ case, dressed up in ‘Marxist’ or ‘socialist’ language. If these dupes are offended by this, then so be it. Perhaps Ian thinks I should be banned under the safe spaces policy! I am not “in a huff”. I am furious with those who are defending the anti-democratic 1707 Act of Union and calling it ‘internationalism’. Marx and Lenin would be even more furious.
Steve Freeman
LU Scottish Republic Yes tendency
Proxy nats
On July 31, I had the pleasure of listening to comrade Steve Freeman, who has recently been gracing the Weekly Worker letters pages on a regular basis in support of the left-nationalist ‘yes’ campaign. He was addressing a meeting of Lewisham and Greenwich Left Unity, in what was supposed to be a debate between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps on the left. But unfortunately the branch was unable to find anyone in London who could speak for the ‘no’ - Workers Power stated that it had nobody available.
As a result, the meeting was rather one-sided: while I did my best to argue for a boycott, everyone else who spoke was for a ‘yes’. And I must say that, if this meeting is anything to go by, there has been a complete and utter capitulation to Scottish nationalism. As I pointed out, it is as though most comrades have now given up on the working class as an agent for change and have constituted themselves as proxy nationalists.
None more so than comrade Freeman himself. Unbelievably, he held up the statements of the Scottish National Party as examples of the progressive, democratic, popular movement that is sweeping Scotland. Did you know that the SNP has promised a “written constitution”, genuine democracy and self-determination, and the possibility of a “constituent assembly”, should Scotland eventually decide to ditch the monarchy?
Comrade Freeman was convinced that such a constituent assembly would boast a strong republican component - although he was forced to concede that the SNP’s current sycophantic adherence to the monarchy under “Her Majesty, the Queen” (to quote the declaration he read out) was a “contradiction”. You can say that again.
Amazingly, he denied that the ‘yes’ campaign he supports had any connection to Scottish nationalism. No, it is all about “unionism vs anti-unionism”. No doubt, had someone from the ‘no’ camp been present, they would have argued that it is really about ‘internationalism vs nationalism’, but both lines are equally absurd. The referendum is clearly a battle between British nationalism and Scottish nationalism - one comrade agreed with me on this, but said we should nevertheless side with the more progressive Scottish variant.
Along similar lines, comrade Freeman actually began his talk by comparing the Scottish movement for independence with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist oppression. That really takes the biscuit for absurdity. It seems to have escaped comrade Freeman’s attention that Scotland is not an oppressed nation - there are and always have been a comparatively huge number of Scots at the very top of the British ruling class, into which they are fully integrated.
But for comrade Freeman Scotland is in a “forced marriage”, thanks to the 1707 Act of Union, which he seems to “hate” as much as you could hate anything. Leaving aside the implication in this that both England and Scotland were actually nations capable of exercising self-determination at the turn of the 18th century (they were not), 300 years later the Scots have regularly shown that they do not regard themselves as being in a union against their will through their support for British political parties and institutions. Perhaps if, as seems likely, there is a ‘no’ victory on September 18, even Steve will be forced to admit that the term “forced marriage” does not apply.
Other arguments included the notion that a ‘yes’ would be seen as anti-austerity and should therefore be supported as progressive; that with independence the Scottish working class would be better placed to “fight against its own bourgeoisie”; and, as claimed by comrade Freeman himself, a defeat for David Cameron might force his resignation and a crisis among the ruling class - what is bad for them must be good for us.
When I pointed out that if a meteorite struck the City of London that might be very damaging for British capital, but it would hardly constitute a progressive advance, comrade Freeman replied that the difference is that a ‘yes’ vote would result from a “mass movement”.
Yes, Steve, it is a mass movement for separatism, for Scottish nationalism - and you have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.
Peter Manson
South London
Anti-Semitism
In his debate with Steve Freeman, Ian Donovan says, “I do not see how someone of English origin can be an anti-English racist any more than someone of Jewish origin can be an anti-Semite” (Letters, July 31). Anti-English racism is not a phenomenon I recognise and if such sentiments are expressed then they are more likely than not to be a distorted and backward expression of anti-colonialism.
However the question of anti-Semitism is quite different. First we have to recognise that, just as the identity of Jewish people has changed over the past centuries, so too has anti-Semitism. In certain periods and in certain countries, like Poland and Spain of the 15th century, it represented a backward peasant reaction to the role of Jews as their oppressors (tax collectors, etc). Medieval anti-Semitism, however, had little or nothing in common with modern racial anti-Semitism.
Today what is termed ‘anti-Semitism’ is also more likely than not to be a reaction to Israeli atrocities and the identification by Jewish communities with those actions. However racial anti-Semitism does exist, especially in eastern Europe (for example, Jobbik in Hungary and the Right Sector and Svoboda in Ukraine). Anti-Semitism thus is still an objective reality, albeit a marginal form of racism or prejudice. Today’s neo-Nazis overwhelmingly identify with Israel (Jobbik and Germany’s NPD are the only exceptions I know of).
Zionism is the political ideology of Israeli settler-colonialism. It is quite capable of being an anti-Semitic movement by which I concretely mean that it aids and supports the anti-Semitic opponents of Jewish communities. This is not an academic point. In Ukraine Zionist and Israeli groups have openly worked with neo-Nazis in Svoboda and the Right Sector. Israel has refused to condemn the fact that Ukraine is the first European government to contain open neo-Nazis since 1945.
Experience shows that, if anti-Semitism means anything, then Zionism is its Jewish twin. It not only accepts the parameters set by anti-Semites, but they form the kernel of Zionist ideology: viz that Jews are strangers in and do not belong in the countries they are citizens of. According to the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, anti-Semitism has something of the “divine will to good” in it. Without anti-Semitism there would be no Jewish immigrants in Israel.
It is therefore inevitable that such despicable behaviour finds an echo in Israel today. When on July 14 a small anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv was attacked by Jewish fascists, some of the latter were sporting the slogans of European neo-Nazis (in particular the slogan, ‘Good night, left side’).
In Israel in 2007 an openly neo-Nazi group was formed that attacked elderly and vulnerable Jews, including holocaust survivors and migrant Thai labourers. Police found an email on the computer of their leader, ‘Eli the Nazi’, saying: “I won’t have kids. My grandfather is half Yid, so that this piece of trash won’t have ancestors with even the smallest percent of Jewish blood.”
In another file, he was quoted as writing: “I will never give up. I was a Nazi and will remain a Nazi. I won’t rest until we kill them all.” Who could deny that they were anti-Semitic?
Ian Donovan knows that the ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon, who has flirted with holocaust denial, is an anti-Semite. What would he call this neo-Nazi group - who were admitted to Israel because they could trace a Jewish grandparent (the Nuremberg definition of a Jew), whilst, of course, the right of return to the Palestinians is denied - if not anti-Semitic?
Tony Greenstein
Brighton
Capitulations
The sordid history of electoral politics in the United States, especially in relation to the radical left, is grim. In recent years, comrades seeking to propose an authentic opposition to bourgeois politics have been consistently disheartened, as those claiming the mantle of the socialist tradition genuflect to either the Democratic Party, their environmentally friendly cousins in the Green Party or the plethora of populist candidates - all in the name of a rehashed lesser-evilism. The issue rarely becomes more complex than observing at what velocity their knees hit the floor before capitalist politicians.
But the fact that we are in the gutter does not mean we cannot look at the stars. And something certainly seemed to align with the election of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle city council in November 2013. Running as a member of Socialist Alternative, the Committee for a Workers’ International affiliate in the United States, Sawant built on the momentum of 2012, when she secured 29% of the vote in her bid for a seat in the House of Representatives. A year later saw her defeat the Democratic city council incumbent, Richard Conlin.
While openly socialist candidates in the United States tend to rant and rave about the unprecedented success of achieving 1.6% of the vote, Sawant rode the wave of endorsements from union locals, the Seattle Green Party, city newspapers and figures such as Rage Against the Machine’s guitarist Tom Morello. Even a handful of Seattle Democratic Party groups saw the shift in the wind and lavished praise on Sawant. In the wake of her previous defeat and the coordinated crackdowns that dispersed Occupy encampments nationwide, SA called on radicals to “imagine 200 Occupy candidates”. This dream never materialised, but securing the first socialist to be elected in Seattle since the late 19th century certainly did.
Sawant’s victory would have been improbable at best, had she not capitalised upon the nationwide one-day strikes by Wal-Mart and fast-food workers. The call for coordinated actions demanding a $15 per hour minimum wage followed soon thereafter and resonated in Seattle. The endorsement of The Stranger, Seattle’s second largest newspaper, certainly helped SA, as it mobilised volunteers to cover the city with posters and yard signs. The newspaper described her as “sharp as a tack and loud as an air horn”.
Early predictions suggested that Sawant would fight the good fight, as she had done in 2012. Even the initial results suggested Conlin would squeeze by and silence the third party opposition. But she grabbed a narrow lead and never looked back. Conlin was forced to concede to a self-proclaimed socialist.
Sawant’s call for a $15 hourly minimum wage in Seattle is actually in tune with the city’s Democratic mayor, Ed Murray. In collaboration with the labour bureaucrats Sawant helped pass a bill that led to a Seattle Times headline: ‘Mayor’s plan lifts minimum wage to $15 - eventually’. And that is precisely what the bill does - it seeks to implement the wage increase slowly and progressively, reaching the $15 target between 2017 and 2021. Nevertheless SA’s website was triumphant:
“Through her public position Kshama Sawant was able to counter the propaganda in the corporate media and expose big business’s attempts to water down $15 and hide behind the concerns of small business. Against the claims of some that electoral politics only serve to coopt genuine working class movements, we showed how elected office can be used to build and strengthen them. Socialist Alternative, together with 15 Now and labor, built enough pressure from below to force big business into conceding $15, an historic achievement.”
Hardly. SA took flak for refusing to pursue any meaningful measures to demand a stronger law, reducing the credibility of the name ‘$15 Now’ to rubble for anyone paying attention. One does not need to be an economist to know that $15 does not pay the rent - let alone cut it for a hyper-exploited class that deserves a world without economic bondage. Despite these obvious capitulations, Sawant’s organisation still seeks to contribute to “rebuilding the labor movement and creating a new mass party of and for the 99%”.
For those who consider the cohering of a real party that can challenge the system of capitalism and topple it more than a part-time hobby, these developments are not altogether surprising. Contrary to the plethora of coverage of the Seattle election, hailing it as some historic milestone, from both alternative and bourgeois press alike, the politics of Peter Taaffe’s CWI are relatively consistent with their past political heritage.
This is not the first time that the CWI has held some form of office. The group held executive positions in Liverpool during Margaret Thatcher’s anti-worker crusades in the early 1980s. At the time, it went by the name ‘Militant’ and declared: “Better to break the law than break the poor.” Taaffe’s group existed primarily as an appendage to the Labour Party and did not hesitate to boast about increasing the Labour vote in Liverpool for the 1987 elections. Taaffe states that during this period, “Militant showed the way in Liverpool.” However, by 1986, Labour was calling for a suspension of its Liverpool branch and sought to expel those members who were fomenting more radical views.
This was in response to Liverpool city council, with strong Militant backing, passing what was seen as an impractical budget, where it was argued that the government should make up the deficit. Even an elementary Marxist understanding of the state posits the necessity of workers’ power, not merely taking hold of the capitalist state machinery. Much of these events encompassed the peak of Militant’s influence, as expulsions from the Labour Party would follow rapidly.
Formally, Militant’s heir, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, declares: “When faced with expulsion proceedings in 1982, Militant’s editorial board decided to challenge the national executive committee’s unconstitutional and undemocratic move in the courts.” Anyone with an iota of class-consciousness should realise the detriments of dragging the affairs of the workers’ movement into the bourgeois courts. Such an effort crosses a fundamental class line.
Furthermore, taking up executive positions in Liverpool merely led to the forefathers of the CWI overseeing attacks on workers and oppressed. This experience posits the urgent need for authentic communist principles.
And there is quite the imperative for Marxist probity in this terrain. Sawant, whether through intent or negligence, took the lessons of Militant’s tenure in Liverpool to heart. In Seattle, a city that witnesses some of the most grotesque and perpetual brutality by the police, the horrors led to the appointment of Kathleen O’Toole by mayor Murray as the new chief of police. Just as before, there is a fundamental class line to draw against the cops. However, the newly elected member of the city council hopped and skipped over this line by arguing: “What Seattle and other cities need is consent-based policing, where the police are genuinely accountable to the people.”
As if the armed fists of the capitalist state will suddenly be held accountable for their perversions of justice! The police serve a fundamental class role, but this has always been a tough pill to swallow for the CWI and SA, who see them as “workers in blue”. Numerous others on the reformist left have pointed out the flawed nature of the notion that the police are merely held back from aiding the proletarian struggle by their badges.
Sawant neglects all of this and defends the new police chief, since “she has expressed a commitment to really build a relationship with the community. She calls for a tiered approach for policing protests, in which riot gear police are used strategically, and only pulled out if they are absolutely necessary.” If only the cops would build deeper ties with our communities and use riot gear strategically, surely we would all make our way to a brighter tomorrow.
In contrast to such abject opportunism, Leon Trotsky stated in his History of the Russian Revolution: “The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question. Beat them up and kill them. It is different with the soldiers: the crowd makes every effort to avoid hostile encounters with them; on the contrary, seeks ways to dispose them in its favour, convince, attract, fraternise, merge them in itself.”
Surely an organisation like SA would not perpetuate such illusions in a force that dispersed the Occupy movement it had held so dear as a landmark development.
A distinct thread can be drawn between Militant’s tenure in Liverpool, the CWI’s blatant reformism and the shortcomings of Sawant’s victory in Seattle. Thus, what is being drawn up is the framework of even deeper capitulations to capitalist ‘democracy’. Beneath the veneer of challenging the parties of Wall Street lie ready-made concessions to the state in the form of political surrender. To do battle with our class enemies is to construct a steeled Bolshevik party in opposition to capitalism, not one that hails the crumbs from the table as historic gains.
In discussing the Transitional programme, Trotsky argued: “The reformists have a good smell for what the audience wants ... But that is not serious revolutionary activity. We must have the courage to be unpopular, to say, ‘You are fools’, ‘You are stupid’, ‘They betray you’, and every once in a while with a scandal launch our ideas with passion.”
The CWI has certainly launched its ideas with passion. Tragically, its appetites lead it to slide backwards in capitulating to the system as is.
Cory Ansel
email
Democratic
Jon D White’s letter could have been written for Private Eye (July 31). Headed ‘No expulsions’, it accepts that the two London branches of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were indeed expelled, but claims this was not for political reasons.
In order to demonstrate the democratic nature of his party, he advises us that the proscription on the use of the full SPGB name was removed in 2008, 17 years after the two branches were expelled. Oh well, that’s all right then.
So, why were the two branches expelled in 1991? For continuing to use the full name of the SPGB, I think you will find. Behind which was a political analysis that the Clapham SPGB had moved away from its own declaration of principles by, for example, supporting Solidarność in Poland and in adopting the anarchist position in relation to the state by calling for its immediate abolition.
And have the two branches and their members been readmitted to the SPGB? Of course not. Have those expulsions been formally revoked? I don’t think so.
So much for the ultra-liberal and democratic SPGB.
Andrew Northall
Kettering
Good issue
I thought Weekly Worker 1021 (July 31) was a good issue. Topical (Gaza, Scots nats, Miliband) without being opportunist. Broad and challenging, not incestuous (‘left-village’), with room for more than the newsy (Mather, Macnair, Ford).
Mike Belbin
London