Letters

Grow a pair

Chris Strafford attempts to defend the actions of himself and his comrades in Manchester Left Unity in regard to the suspension of CPGB and Communist Platform member Laurie McCauley (Letters, May 28).

Unfortunately comrade Strafford’s musings offer little in the way of concrete facts or historical reality. He writes: “Apart from a few responses on social media, I have not risen to the personal attacks, the outright lies and smears against myself and the Manchester branch by Laurie’s organisation.” Well, actually in his letter he does smear comrade McCauley, making allegations without citing any concrete examples. He refers to Laurie’s “persistently bad behaviour, where members, particularly women, were treated to sneers, jibes and personal insults”. So what was said specifically?

This silence begs the question: are we talking personal insults or actually political disagreement? In the current state of the prissy left, comrades get very upset and agitated when their politics are criticised. And what is this about “particularly women”? (In truth political criticisms were levelled by comrade McCauley against one female comrade - see ‘What safe spaces lead to’ Weekly Worker May 22 2014). And the “jibes and personal insults”? Was he calling her fat? Making fun of her outfit? What was so beyond the pale?

Comrade Strafford goes on to criticise the leadership of the CPGB, commenting: “The behaviour of the group’s leaders towards those it sees as threats, whether internal or external, has always been vicious, often apolitical and personal and ultimately concerned with preserving the leadership body, not progressing a political strategy. The hallmarks of a sect.”

As I recall, when political differences arose between the leadership of this organisation and Chris Strafford over his desire to turn Communist Students into a broad-based campus project, rather than a student-based organisation, the debates we had were not “apolitical”, but rather about how best to organise students on campus. The discussions were around how organisations such as CS, etc relate to the party as a whole and the discipline expected of members of the CPGB, as opposed to the discipline expected of, for example, non-CPGB members of CS.

These examples are palpably about “political strategy”, not “personal attacks. As for the “vicious” behaviour of the leadership against perceived “threats”, this is reminiscent of the “jibes and personal insults” mentioned above. What specifically does he find so vicious? Open debate? Hard polemic?

In terms of his own political differences with the CPGB, comrade Strafford, just like anyone proposing an opposition viewpoint, was given the opportunity to write in this paper, and encouraged to argue his position at CPGB aggregates and political events. In reality, rather than fight his corner, the comrade rarely attended such events. In fact, he and his comrades in Manchester boycotted the CS conference where his motion on changing the nature of CS into a broad-based campaign was put.

Comrade Strafford continues with a fictional history: “… this is not the first time I have been involved in an action to censure Laurie because of his behaviour in a political organisation. Laurie was removed from an organising role in the London branch of Communist Students, with the blessing of the current leadership of the CPGB, because of his destructive behaviour within it.” The truth was comrade McCauley asked to leave London to go to Scarborough. He wasn’t “removed” to Yorkshire’s equivalent to Siberia (no offence!).

Lastly, the comrade comments: “At no time have we opposed open reporting of our political work, whether online or in the pages of the Weekly Worker. What we have no time for, and neither should Left Unity, is destructive personal attacks by individual members that disrupt and damage our collective work.”

Let’s be clear: comrade McCauley’s report of his branch meeting (the reason given by Manchester for their decision to suspend him) focused on political differences. Firstly, how two comrades, Bev Keenan and Ian Parker, sought to organise and build the branch - not what they wore, their hairdos, their taste in music, etc. The other key issue was in regard to how LU should approach the allegations of domestic abuse made against RMT top and Socialist Party member Steve Hedley.

If comrade Laurie used colourful language in his report, so what? That’s the nature of politics. At the risk of being deemed sexist, grow a pair!

Sarah McDonald
London

Unfortunate

I have known Laurie McCauley for many years and I do not recognise the description of him contained in Chris Strafford’s letter. I have always found Laurie to be calm, rational and comradely in debates, irrespective of whether he agreed or disagreed with me or others.

It is unfortunate that the failure to deal with his case has led to this lengthy and unjustified suspension - and now this attempt at character assassination.

Yassamine Mather
London

Saturday stall

It was refreshing to see Jim Lowe’s well-crafted and thought-inducing letter last week about the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition electoral campaign for council seats in north Devon (May 28).

I was especially struck by this passage: “there are deep levels of cynicism amongst large swathes of the working class. Many of these people seem unwilling to countenance any possibility that politics might bring about any positive change in their condition.” His next sentence reports the same old, same old, the hammer-blow to the possibility of a collective response, however partial and fragmentary: “They are inward-looking, seeking to shut themselves off from the world.” The lonely crowd. Bowling alone. Bluntly, Tusc found that no-one listens to us, no-one believes us, that our message is rejected by those who would seemingly benefit most from what we call for. Why?

Jim says, “although the modern left has the benefit of the corpus of Marxist works, ... it is in a comparable situation to that of the utopians. There is a lack of awareness and understanding concerning the balance and nature of class forces, and the attitudes of strata within classes, to be able to ground a strategy on a concrete assessment of the society we live in.” That’s the relationship of knowledge/ignorance to practice, and in terms of class struggle Leo Panitch made a historical point last Friday, at the opening plenary of the Left Forum in faraway New York, when recounting a conversation he had had with Tony Benn a few years before the 2008 financial crisis.

Benn: when do you think a socialist politics will re-emerge?

Panitch: I think we may be in a period like that between the Chartists and the 1889 London dockers’ strike.

This idea has also been expressed in post-crisis Britain, especially after the 2011 public-sector pension strikes (remember them?), the high point in saying ‘no’ to the almost seven years of the exploited and oppressed financing both the state and a recovery in profitability.

The 1889 dockers, whilst helping value flow in and out of London, helping the empire along swimmingly on its sweet and merry way, had nowhere to turn themselves, all individual solutions having left them resolutely glued to the bottom of the barrel, scarcely indistinguishable from the detritus of life. Their physical circumstances were almost certainly worse than today’s dockers in, for example, Lagos or Karachi; as Colonel Birt, the boss of Millwall docks (was this the origin of ‘no-one likes us’?) told a parliamentary committee:

“The poor fellows are miserably clad, scarcely with a boot on their foot ... These are men who come to work in our docks who come on without having a bit of food in their stomachs, perhaps since the previous day; they have worked for an hour and have earned 5d [two pence]; their hunger will not allow them to continue: they take the 5d in order that they may get food, perhaps the first food they have had for 24 hours.”

Wages were so low the buggers couldn’t even do a morning, let alone slave for a whole day. The dock owners were so ‘successful’ in smashing their workers into atoms that the poor blighters had to be continually replaced by the hour. Their rule was so unconstrained that, driven on by competition, they were unable to stop themselves cutting costs to such an extent that they drove down worker productivity by keeping them so hungry that they had to replace them several times a day.

Like the gobbling up of the cod, what was rational for the individual capital was irrational for total capital; here the profit-making of the individual docks reduced the productivity of the sector, and hence the magnitude of value they were conveying, by increasing the socially necessary labour time needed on the wharfs themselves.

By contrast with the 1889 London dockers, today’s exploited and oppressed are finding plenty of ways to avoid taking collective action, as they try to make life a little more bearable. I’m not implying that life must first become wretched, just that in today’s wealthier societies, as Jim found in Devon, there’s plenty of scope for people to sit it out, however miserably, waiting for the ‘good times’ to roll back into town. And the point about us being in a period akin to that without mass organisations is that it ignores the spectral fact that we’re moved on 130 years and, although those organisations, largely dried-out husks, are still competing for members and electoral support, their failure speaks volumes about ‘what may have been, but doesn’t exist’. In a fundamental sense, after all the setbacks, especially the capitalisation of our organisations, we’re worse off than our 19th century comrades, who at least lived in the hope of the breaking of a new dawn rather than us witnessing each morning a splintered sunrise.

Jim correctly says that “sometimes the best strategy is to think of new questions”. Just as the idea and the physical possibility of a post-capitalist society originate in the present society, likewise rational, that is useful, questions arise from the reasoned evidence of what exists, which includes what is practically possible right now. And facing reality puts a premium on discovering ‘the facts’. To their great credit the Devon Tuscs have tried to dig up some of these through their canvassing.

In this they are continuing the heuristic tradition within the workers’ and socialist movements, an early example being in 1880, a few months before Marx helped write the programme of the Parti Ouvrier (Workers’ Party), when he responded to a different request from French comrades. La Revue socialiste wanted to learn about workers, so decided to organise the distribution of a questionnaire; Marx wrote, in English, the 100 or so questions (www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol04/no12/marx.htm). The experience of similar work in more recent years in the US, France and Italy are detailed in two articles that comrades may find they can apply in some way, by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi (https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy), and by Marta Malo de Molina (http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en).

The task facing us is immense. UK socialist and anarchist organisations might direct the political activity of perhaps 10,000 members and supporters, so, given a population of 65 million, perhaps 47 million adults, we need to grow almost 50-fold to just be our own 1%. North Devon may not be Britain’s Red Bologna, but it’s where we’re at. Perhaps Jim and his comrades, having chosen to talk with people, not at them, will share their provisional thoughts in discussion with some of those they met, those who either supported what Tusc were saying or expressed some interest, and maybe something useful, perhaps enduring, can come out of that.

In the meantime, if only to meet the usual and have a mumble in the grumble, there’s always the Saturday stall.

Jara Handala
email

Very proud

’s election assessment did not acknowledge the Bermondsey campaign, which caused controversy, and where the CPGB had to choose whether the best Labourite candidate was from the Labour Party or Tusc-Left Unity. It is not just votes, but politics, or policies, that must be considered.

The contest was ‘too close to call’. Like the Tories, Simon Hughes used the anti-Scottish card against Labour, but to no avail. Bermondsey passed its verdict on Hughes and his support for the Tory coalition government by voting for Labour’s Neil Coyle, who won by 22,146 to 17,657. Since the Tory vote was 6,051, on paper supporters of the Con Dem coalition had more votes in total (23,708).

At the next level were Ukip (3,254) and the Greens (2,023) as the ‘new’ parties pitching for the future. The rest of the candidates got less than 200 votes. The total socialist vote in Bermondsey was 162, but there were two socialist candidates, Tusc-Left Unity and myself as a Republican Socialist and anti-unionist candidate.

I am, of course, very proud of the few who voted for democratic revolution and a social republic. But the harsh truth is that Cameron’s Tory royalist, unionist and capitalist party got the best vote in England and the Republican Socialist and anti-unionist got the worst (if we ignore the ballot-rigging in Kent). If truth doesn’t kill us it will make us stronger.

The CPGB must be disappointed that their Tusc-LU candidate made no impact on the Labour vote. Despite his declared aim of saving the deposit, their vote was poor. However the vote was not out of line with other Southwark constituencies with safe Labour seats. In Peckham, the Labour majority was 25,000 and Tusc got 292, while in Dulwich and West Norwood, with a Labour majority of 16,000, the Tusc candidate got 248 votes.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. The Republican Socialists stood their first ever openly anti-unionist candidate in England. There was very different politics between the Labourite Tusc-LU candidate and Republican Socialism, as if the ghosts of 1945 met the democratic future. Post-war Labourism is still winning - Tusc-LU got 88% of the socialist vote and the Republican Socialists 12%. It is a picture that would look very different in Scotland, Ireland or Wales.

The 88:12 ratio in conservative England is hardly surprising, especially given the overwhelming backing of the Socialist Party, the SWP, Socialist Resistance, CPGB and Workers Power for Tusc-LU. Whilst we shouldn’t set too much store by one election, it the best estimate we can make of the division among socialists between the majority, who still support Labourite ‘economism’, and the militant republican socialist minority, who put the struggle for democracy to the fore.

In the bigger policy picture, Labour is monarchist, unionist and pro-capitalist. Republican Socialists are not surprisingly republican, anti-unionist and socialist. In between is the Tusc-LU bloc. Tusc is monarchist and unionist by default of having no policy which might upset the trade union bureaucracy. Left Unity has by some mysterious process adopted a republican position in its manifesto, but not at its conference. It remains wedded to the British union. This would still be policy if the Republican Socialists had got no votes at all or if we had taken the easier option of not standing.

If voters in Bermondsey had asked Tusc-LU about their policy on the constitutional monarchist system of government, the candidate might have said ‘It doesn’t matter’ or ‘We have two policies: one for monarchists and another if you are republican’. Voters would have thought this was some unprincipled monarchist-republican lash-up.

He says: “There is nothing inherently terrible about derisory election results, especially for young organisations like LU and Tusc. Electoral performances are to be measured against the aims of the organisation standing, and here that Tusc uselessness becomes obvious” (‘A wasteful dead-end’, May 21). So if the CPGB thinks Tusc is useless why did they back the Tusc-LU bloc? What were the aims of the Republican Socialists, by which we can measure performance?

Steve Freeman
Left Unity and Republican Socialist candidate

Zombie

The failure to put forward a mayoral candidate on a socialist, class-struggle platform in Tower Hamlets suggests that a large portion of the British left has learnt absolutely nothing from the experience of Respect.

I had hoped after George Galloway’s well-deserved defeat in Bradford by Naz Shah, against whom he had made so many false allegations, that Respect mark I was in its death agony, but, like some flesh-eating zombie, Galloway has returned to London to stand for mayor - the £10,000 deposit being no obstacle to a man of his astonishing wealth. In the meantime, the same nauseating combination of communalism and popular frontism has re-emerged in East London as a Respect mark II in the form of Tower Hamlets First.

Whilst Lutfur Rahman may well have been unfairly singled out for punishment as a political outsider, when we all know that other elected mayors belonging to New Labour, and perhaps other mainstream parties, have abused this intrinsically autocratic position to award contracts, grants and jobs to their friends in a corrupt or clientelistic fashion, this does not mean that we should turn Rahman into a hero.

Only the completely deluded can genuinely see any similarity with George Lansbury and the Poplar council of 1919 (or for that matter with councillors in Clay Cross in the 1970s or Liverpool and Lambeth in the 1980s), so one has to presume that many peddling this line are doing so in bad faith. Whilst Rahman and his associates may have brought in a few measures in favour of the poor and dispossessed - particularly the local restoration of the education maintenance allowance - they nonetheless passed a budget incorporating a massive anti-working class cuts package; in short, their record, whilst perhaps a little bit better than ultra-Blairite administrations in boroughs like Lewisham, is no better than some Labour councils practising a feeble version of the ‘dented shield’ strategy elsewhere in the country.

Yet the leadership of Left Unity - many of whose key figures were, not coincidentally, in Respect, have rushed to give unconditional support to Rahman’s anointed successor, Rabina Khan. Moreover, the situation inside Tower Hamlets Tusc has shown the dire effects of the coalition’s rules, which give any one of the four constituent organisations a veto. The local Socialist Workers Party vetoed the Socialist Party’s sensible proposal that Tusc stand a mayoral candidate on a distinctively class-struggle platform and then went on to veto the SP’s suggestion that a letter be sent to Rabina Khan asking her whether she was prepared to accept a relatively minimal set of demands - opposing cuts and supporting trade union rights - of a kind similar to those included in letters sent by a number of local Tusc groups to prospective Labour parliamentary candidates in the run-up to the general election.

The SWP’s unwillingness to ask Rabina Khan where she stood on these basic class questions strongly suggests that they have no real confidence in her commitment to class-struggle politics, but are willing to endorse a candidate purely on the basis of her religion, ethnic origin and gender - the sort of identity politics that they have denounced in other contexts. Whilst Rahman and, presumably, Khan are merely ambitious, populist demagogues, to get the vote out they rely on people associated with Islamic Forum Europe (the British front for Jamaat-e-Islami, a set of extreme rightwing Sunni fundamentalists, whose membership in Bangladesh enthusiastically collaborated with the occupying Pakistani army in genocidal massacres of anybody remotely sympathetic to the liberation fighters in the 1971 war of independence).

Doubtless the whole spectrum of leftist Rahman fans inside and outside Left Unity will respond by yelling Racist Islamophobe!’ in unison, but anybody endorsing a lash-up that one might describe as Jamaat-e-Trotsky, perhaps as a preliminary for throwing themselves head first into a Galloway mayoral campaign, can count me out! At a time when the general election has demonstrated that sections of the white working class, feeling abandoned by a neoliberal Labour Party, have in their despair and demoralisation moved towards Ukip, and increasing numbers of Hindus and Sikhs have moved towards the Tories, the genuine left desperately needs to rebuild the unity of the whole class across ethnic and religious divides on a strongly anti-capitalist and avowedly socialist basis - not rebrand itself as a party exclusively for Muslims, and a particular brand of Sunni fundamentalist Muslims at that.

Toby Abse
email

Fight bill

The Trade Union Bill shows what David Cameron and the Tory government really thinks of workers in Britain. During the general election campaign, David Cameron claimed the Tories were “the real party of the working people”. He follows those comments up, less than three weeks after the election, by announcing severe curbs on trade union rights which, unless opposed, will effectively outlaw the right to strike.

There are two main clauses to this bill: A new 50% threshold for union strike ballot turnouts - 50% of union members would have to vote in any ballot irrespective of any majority in favour of action; and, in essential public services - listed as health, education, fire and transport - 40% of those entitled to vote, as opposed to 40% of those who do vote, would have to back the action for it to happen legally.

If these principles were applied to elections and politicians, no local results would be valid, because turnout is always well under 50% - usually between 20% and 30% in fact. Furthermore, the new Tory government only received the support of 24% of those entitled to vote, so why should unions have to reach 40%? The Tories did not even get support from 40% of those who did vote, so what mandate do they actually have for this draconian legislation which aims to take away rights won by struggle over the last 100 years. The hypocrisy of it all stinks.

The bill also allows the government, again for the first time, to allow agency workers to break strikes by taking the jobs of workers on strike. Taken with the other measures, this bill would make it almost impossible to go on strike, let alone win one. In one fell swoop, a basic human right will be taken away from working people - the right to defend their jobs, conditions, pay or the service they provide. This comes as Cameron aims to chip away at paid holidays, rest breaks and maternity rights in his negotiations with the EU - further attacks on workers.

The main reason for these attacks on the hard-fought-for rights of working people is to stop public-sector workers in particular from defending public services and fighting back against the extreme cuts and pay freezes we are all about to face. The measures announced in this bill would mean workers having to put up with zero-hour contracts, job insecurity, low pay and long hours - in both the public and private sector. This is nothing more than a ‘bosses’ charter’ to hire and fire indiscriminately. No wonder business leaders are looking forward to the next five years.

We will work with local trade unions to oppose this bill and, if the bill is passed, we will support workers who take strike action, whatever the majority vote in favour or size of turnout. Draconian laws have to be opposed in a democracy, and Tusc will lead the way in doing so.

Pete McLaren
Rugby

Truths

There is certainly no doubt in my mind that Andrew Northall is correct in suggesting that the uncertain disposition of many Left Unity members towards Weekly Worker supporters is a reaction to the paper’s criticisms of the project. The real question is, why should this be the case? Is the wider membership of LU really so scared of a ‘tiny far-left sect’?

If it is, then they shouldn’t be. There is no sensible reason I can think of to simply ignore criticism, less still if that criticism comes from within your own ranks (and whether we ‘fit in’ or not is neither here nor there - we are LU members). Whether you like it or not, the criticisms printed in the Weekly Worker are intended to help the left, not to hinder it; if they are wrong then don’t heed them - argue against them. But if they hit upon some uncomfortable truths (and surely they must now and again - otherwise why all the fuss?) then you would need some spectacular pig-headedness to simply hand-wave them away.

Comrade Northall baldly states that Left Unity aims to be a broad-based reformist-revolutionary party and seems to think this settles the matter. It doesn’t. This is precisely what I meant by his (all too common) assumption that LU is a ‘finished article’: that because it started as one thing it couldn’t possibly become another. There is obviously the possibility of change or evolution: a reason to have a continuing stake in the party - to continue paying subs, to continue attending meetings - even as someone who might not agree with it in its entirety.

For all the cooing over new model parties, and the flak that communists catch for being ‘stuck in the past’, it is the obsession with not rocking the boat that really indicates how much of a time warp the left is stuck in. Thin skin and pathological timidity are what really damages the left. The arguments are out there to be won: capitalism continues to endure the aftershocks of one of the most catastrophic crises in its history - which must surely mark one of the most significant validations of our politics in decades - and yet by comrade Northall’s estimation we should all insulate ourselves from one another lest feelings get hurt or a broad-based coalition inadvertently finds itself openly discussing the politics of its members; suddenly looking less broad, but perhaps a hell of a lot less cynical in the process.

Tom Munday
London