Letters

Spart caricature

Corey Ansel’s letter (August 6) usefully reports a rare small political victory for independent working class politics in the USA - the election of Kshama Sawant to Seattle city council in October 2013. He rightly draws attention to the unavoidable limitations of communist participation in local government, especially as a minority. But the letter also regrettably displays the Oehlerite sectarianism (from Hugo Oehler, 1903-83), which is the dominant political feature of the US-based ‘Spartacist’ tradition. This poisonous Spartacist influence is reflected most transparently in the language at the end, referring to a “steeled Bolshevik party” and the Committee for a Workers’ International’s “appetites”: both are language tics of James Robertson’s cult group and its offshoots.

Comrade Ansel rightly points out that the CWI’s website overblows the significance of the very limited victory on the $15 minimum wage issue. But it should be recognised nonetheless that this is a victory, even if it is a very limited one. If a strike won only limited concessions, it would still have won concessions. Communists need to be able to distinguish limited victory from outright defeat, and comrade Ansel’s comment effectively erases the difference.

He links the issue to the rather inglorious story of the CWI’s predecessor, the Militant Tendency, and its period of leadership of a left-Labour coalition controlling Liverpool city council in the 1980s. He says that Militant “existed primarily as an appendage to the Labour Party and did not hesitate to boast about increasing the Labour vote”. This is another example of Spartacist Oehlerism: the Militant Tendency was openly engaged in Trotskyist entry in the Labour Party (the issue on which Oehler broke with the Trotskyists). By impliedly asserting that entry is inherently unprincipled (“appendage”), comrade Ansel reduces the strength of his valid criticisms of Militant’s completely illusory attempt to defeat the Labour leadership’s decision to purge its leaders by going to the capitalist courts. Missing is the important criticism made of Militant’s policy in Liverpool, as of the rest of the ‘local government left’, by other left groups at the time: that it failed to join hands with the miners’ strike when it could have done so in 1984-85.

Missing, too, is Trotsky on participation in local government: not a policy of abstention, but: “The participation of the trade unions in the management of nationalised industry may be compared to the participation of socialists in the municipal governments, where the socialists sometimes win a majority and are compelled to direct an important municipal economy, while the bourgeoisie still has domination in the state and bourgeois property laws continue. Reformists in the municipality adapt themselves passively to the bourgeois regime. Revolutionists in this field do all they can in the interests of the workers and at the same time teach the workers at every step that municipality policy is powerless without conquest of state power” (‘Nationalised industry and workers’ management’, 1938).

The last section of comrade Ansell’s letter concerns the question of the police. Communists stand for: “The dissolution of the standing army [including the professional police force - MM] and the formation of a popular militia under democratic control”. But we also claim that, “As the class struggle intensifies, conditions are created for the workers to arm themselves and win over sections of the military forces of the capitalist state.” So we do not exclude the possibility that sections of the police, any more than any other section of the capitalist state’s armed forces, can possibly be won over - though, of course, we recognise that at present conditions are adverse for doing so. Hence, our immediate demands in this field include: “Rank-and-file personnel in the state’s armed bodies must be protected from bullying, humiliating treatment and being used against the working class; There must be full trade union and democratic rights, including the right to form bodies such as soldiers’ councils. The privileges of the officer caste must be abolished. Officers must be elected. Workers in uniform must become the allies of the masses in struggle” (CPGB Draft programme).

Comrade Sawant’s talk of “consent-based policing, where the police are genuinely accountable to the people”, is indeed unduly ambiguous. But comrade Ansel counterposes an ultra-leftist line. His use of Trotsky is a bad piece of citation-grazing in support of this line: the quotation is from the History of the Russian Revolution (chapter 7, ‘Five days’), and it is not a programmatic proposal at all, but a description of the sentiments of the Petrograd crowd in the February revolution. As for the Bolsheviks, both in 1907 and in the witch-hunt after the July days in 1917, Lenin was assisted by Bolshevik sympathisers in the Finnish police. It is hardly likely that there would be such persons if the Spartacist caricature of Bolshevism on the question of the police, followed by comrade Ansel, was adopted.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Daft and stupid

I won’t accuse Peter Manson of misrepresenting my arguments about Scotland at the Lewisham Left Unity meeting (Letters, August 7), not least because it is difficult to remember the detail when you are a full participant in the debate rather than simply a reporter. Even though Peter’s letter has the CPGB spin, it has the merit of putting the real issues on the table for further elaboration.

I began the meeting by expressing my outrage at the slaughter in Gaza and my solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. I would have begun with Palestine whatever the topic of the meeting. I did not start by comparing Scotland and Palestine. Rather, I then went on the say that Palestine, Ukraine and Scotland were all examples of the national question in contemporary politics. This is indisputable. I briefly mentioned differences and similarities. Palestine and Ukraine involved armed struggle and many deaths. This is not true for Scotland, thank goodness (but nobody should say things cannot change or ‘it can’t happen here’).

I did say we should not label different kinds of nationalism as equally bad. I made a distinction between Israeli nationalism in struggle with Palestinian nationalism, and British nationalism in struggle with Scottish nationalism. On one side were state nationalisms with powerful military machines and on the other national democratic movements of nations or people without states.

At no point did I compare Palestinian and Scottish nationalism and say they were the same. Yet Peter says that I “began … by comparing the Scottish independence movement with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist oppression”. He says, “that really takes the biscuit for absurdity”’. I have awarded Peter the biscuit for twisting an argument for nefarious purposes.

Time did not allow me to develop this point further. So let me add that Gaza is violently oppressed by Israel in alliance with and supported by British and American imperialism. How would Palestinians ‘vote’ on the break-up of Britain? I think the answer is obvious.

Of course, it is the accepted ‘wisdom’ on the English left that Scotland is not an ‘oppressed’ nation. It is such obvious common sense that nobody spends more than two seconds thinking about it. What we can say is that England is the dominant nation within the UK. Scotland is one of the smaller nations and it does not have a right to self-determination. Wales was conquered and Scotland was sold by its upper class. Neither constitutes a democratic or voluntary union.

My main point was that this was a battle between unionists (‘no’) and anti-unionists (‘yes’) with a bunch of fence-sitters wobbling in the middle. People will vote to keep Queen Anne’s bloody Act of Union of 1707 or for its repeal. I described myself as an extreme anti-unionist. The 1707 Act of Union deserved the contempt, hostility and sheer hatred from every democrat, including working class democrats (or communists). Merchants and slave traders thought the act was brilliant in helping them to turn a profit in blood and treasure.

I am an English anti-unionist or an anti-unionist living in England. According to the CPGB, this makes me a Scottish nationalist. This takes the biscuit for absurdity. The CPGB seems determined to big up Scottish nationalism by labelling every anti-unionist a Scottish nationalist. This has gone to such lengths that Sarah McDonald has abandoned the class struggle for anti-nationalism.

The advanced part of the working class in England is democratic and anti-unionist, not Scottish nationalist. English anti-unionists are in alliance with Scottish anti-unionists, some of whom are nationalists, and others working class democrats, republicans and communists.

Peter claims that working class anti-unionists have “given up on the working class as an agent of change”. The opposite is true. He thinks the working class is incapable of political action to smash the Act of Union. Instead he is spreading the idea that only the bourgeois nationalists can destroy it.

Of course, the working class in England is not yet ready to destroy the Act of Union and consign it to the dustbin of history. But, far from “giving up”, the working class is more than capable of finishing off the Act of Union, providing it is not being misled by various left unionist dupes, fence-sitters and those who big up the nationalists.

Anti-unionists are not, as Peter suggests, just ‘Scottish’, but exist in England, Wales and Ireland. Peter says I “denied that the ‘yes’ campaign he [ie, me] supports had any connection to nationalism”. This is daft. Of course the Scottish National Party is nationalist. I don’t deny this and have never denied it. But it is plainly wrong to equate the national democratic movement in Scotland with the SNP.

It is obviously true the SNP is against the Act of Union. But Peter denies that workers in England can support the repeal of the 1707 Act of Union without being Scottish nationalists who support Robert the Bruce and William Wallace. He fails to understand that working class democrats oppose the Act of Union and these can be found in England, Ireland and Wales, not just Scotland.

Finally Peter says he “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”. This is a daft argument, made more stupid by its apparent cleverness. The defeat of Cameron in the referendum will damage the Tory government. But, so goes the argument, if a meteorite came and struck Downing Street, blowing Cameron to kingdom come, would that not be the same? Well, one is a political defeat for the Tories, which finally destroyed the Act of Union. The other is a natural disaster, which does not!

Steve Freeman
LU Scottish Republic Yes tendency

Pinhead

A very strange letter graced the Weekly Worker last week (August 7). Tony Greenstein is dancing on a pinhead, when he argues that it is perfectly possible for Jewish people to be anti-Semitic. I have to say that, as I understand anti-Semitism as a form of racism, no better or worse than any other kind, it means hatred of people of Jewish origin purely for reason of that ethnic origin. A completely indefensible attitude and sickeningly stupid.

If any Jewish person, for reasons of mental aberration, were to hold such a position, the logical thing for them to do would be to commit suicide. Indeed the example Tony gives, of some nutcase of that ilk in Israel, seems to have done the next best thing, and forsworn having children because of his supposedly tainted blood, or similar rubbish (maybe he did not have the bottle to kill himself outright!). The same considerations would go, hypothetically, for anyone of English origin who held such a bizarre view of his fellow nationals - logically he or she should do the same.

But I am interested in political phenomena, not things that, if anything, bear a strong resemblance to the frequent deranged high school massacres in the USA. And I would observe that the other example Tony gives - of a Jewish Nazi group that attacked pro-Palestinian protestors in Israel - bears out my case. There are indeed Jewish Nazis in Israel, but they think Hitler was wrong about the Jews. They are therefore not anti-Semitic - or at least only insofar as Arabs are Semitic, which is not the accepted definition. They want to do something along Hitlerite lines to the Arabs. And I would observe from recent events that they have friends in high places, both in Israel and in the western world, including the US Congress and over here as well.

Gilad Atzmon, whatever you think of his views in detail, is the very opposite of these things. He is a long-time, principled defender of the Palestinians - a fact that is very widely known. Nor does he deny the historical fact of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. Though he is part of a milieu of very angry and alienated Jewish people, many of whom, for perfectly understandable reasons, given the cynical, totalitarian use of the Nazi mass slaughter by Israeli supporters to justify the present decades-long carnage, do have doubts about aspects of this.

I predict that, as the state of Israel descends into the level of popular odium previously reserved for Nazi Germany - a process which just took a big step forward with the current foul, sadistic child-killing frenzy - there will likely be many more decent Jewish people who manifest such mistaken views and suspicions. If Tony wants to join with Israeli apologists in smearing such people as Nazis, then that’s his political funeral.

In fact, just about the only group of people who have such doubts these days are such alienated Jews. I think these are honourable people, whose hearts are 100% in the right place. What matters to me is where they stand on defence of the Palestinians, not on their suspicions about what happened decades before most people today were actually born, and which they therefore cannot have any first-hand knowledge of.

Ian Donovan
email

Safe italics

Paul Demarty notes with some dismay that half of those killed to date in Gaza are “women and children” (‘Only an Arab revolution can liberate Palestine’, August 7). This contrasts strongly with his stance on Northern Ireland (‘Keeping disagreements hidden’, May 15), whereby the abduction and murder of Jean McConville is interpreted as an aspect of “the inevitable bloodshed of a guerrilla war” and the outcry over her disappearance put down to feminist sentimentalism and special pleading.

I am pleased to see that comrade Demarty has undergone a swift political evolution over the last six weeks. I expect a thoughtful piece on safe spaces for women in due course. In the intervening period, could you please stop him from intuitively italicising nouns to emphasise any thing that he thinks might confuse the advanced worker?

Yours, in adjectival solidarity,

James Denton
email

NHS march

This summer will see a long-distance People’s March for the NHS across England. The protest is being led by a group of mothers from Darlington, county Durham. Following in the footsteps of the famous Jarrow marchers, back in 1936, the group of ‘Darlo mums’ are organising a replica march in support of the national health service.

Marchers will leave Jarrow town hall on August 16 and arrive in Parliament Square, London, at 3.30pm on September 6, starting the last leg from Unite’s Theobalds Road office at 2.30pm. The march will cover approximately 300 miles, taking in 23 towns and cities over three weeks. The message from the mums is a simple one - that the NHS is owned by and loved by us, and every effort will be made to stop it being sold off.

The reason for protesting is simple: we want to see a repeal of the Health and Social Care Act and we are aiming for four things: reverse the closure of NHS services; halt the privatisation of NHS care; return responsibility for delivering NHS services to the secretary of state for health; inform the public what is happening to the NHS and build support for it. The NHS was created to deliver free and equal healthcare for all, irrespective of wealth, and those principles are being steadily dismantled - which is why we should be prepared to fight for it.

Within just four months of launching the People’s March, over 3,000 have registered to take part. We want you to join us in the march across England, whether you walk one mile or the whole journey. We also need support from people in the towns and cities that we will travel through and anyone that can offer transport, accommodation or any support, however big or small, will be a huge help to our crusade. Sign up and join the fight at http://999callfornhs.org.uk.

This is our NHS. We made it, we pay for it, we use it and we love it. Will you fight for it?

Rehana Azam and Joanna Adams
People's March for the NHS