Letters

Fostering illusions?

As with many others on the left, I consider that Brenda Nixon should have been supported in the Hemsworth by-election. A large vote demonstrates to the existing Labour Party rank and file that there is a substantial body of workers, previous Labour Party members and supporters outside of the party, who are prepared to seek a political alternative to Blair and co.

However, whether to support or not to support what is so obviously a left reformist candidate is not so straightforward and it is important to establish a criterion upon which we base our decision: otherwise we can flounder in the sea of centrism.

Brenda is standing as a member of the left reformist Socialist Labour Party and this fact no doubt influenced the headlines in Weekly Worker 127: ‘Hemsworth by-election - support the SLP’. In other words to support Brenda Nixon means automatically supporting the party which she represents. It is a conclusion that can have dire consequences for future considerations of joint action with non-revolutionary left forces.

It is important that we realise the maximum of working class unity when we fight the capitalist class and their political representatives, whether they go under the name of Tory, Labour or Liberal. Brenda Nixon, who has a magnificent record of fighting on behalf of miners, has in this by-election raised the flag of opposition to cuts in social services, hospitals, etc, against the rising tide of unemployment, a policy of fighting local council cuts in services, against privatisation, for reopening some of the closed mines, repeal of anti-trade union laws, etc - points upon which we cannot disagree (although we question and criticise left reformist methods).

Her campaign must of necessity focus upon the inability, or rather the refusal, of official Labour to undertake any of these pressing tasks, the illumination of which serves to alienate the workers in general from the Labour reformists. Upon these questions we express our unity of action through giving support to Brenda in the election campaign. But does that mean: ‘Support the SLP’?

To raise the slogan, ‘Support the SLP’, has a much broader perspective than the slogan, ‘Support Brenda Nixon in the Hemsworth by-election’. In the latter we give specific support to her concrete political slogans and proposals, not her membership of the SLP.

If we truly seek to maintain the independence of the working class struggles and organisation, to guard against diluting its revolutionary content, we cannot call upon the workers to support and rally around the left reformist SLP - merely because they are putting forward a militant working class candidate and policy in this particular by-election. To do so is to foster illusions in left reformism, to concede to it leadership of the workers, abdicating our task of seeking to fetch the workers under the banner of social revolution.

This is precisely what the editorial in Weekly Worker does when it states: “Of course, we have many disagreements with the platform that the SLP has stood on in this election. But that is a secondary question” (my emphasis). The main question for the Weekly Worker is “the call for a genuine workers’ party” that has been placed on the “practical agenda of everyone in the workers’ movement”. (So rally around and join the CPGB irrespective of political ideas?) Policy, the political content of an organisation, including its strategy and tactics, is what makes a genuine workers revolutionary party, and it can never be dealt with as a “secondary question”.

To realise the unity of diverse forces against capitalism, where their interests coincide on particular issues, and to retain the independent revolutionary policy and organisation of the working class and its party, we have to study and apply the Leninist tactic of ‘march separate and strike together’. This means: no support for the left reformist SLP (march separate), but unity of action (strike together) through support for a specific policy, as expressed by Brenda Nixon in her Hemsworth election campaign.

Paul Conlon
South London

Political undead

In Weekly Worker 128 Danny Hammill includes Partisan amongst a list of “official communist zombies”. Zombie-ism, in Hammill’s definition, encompasses those who were, and still are, “all too ready to denounce all and any criticism of the Soviet leadership, automatically branding it ‘anti-Soviet’ or, predictably, as ‘Trotskyism’”.

This crude position has nothing in common with that held by Partisan. One of our comrades is presently working on a document entitled, ‘Stalin against the Soviet bureaucracy’, in which, as he puts it, “Stalin can be seen both as a jailer and as a prisoner of the Soviet bureaucracy”. Such a potentially dialectical mode of analysis seems strange for a grouping who are supposed to view the ex-USSR uncritically.

Partisan has been obliged to point out in some depth what should actually be ABC facts. These include, for Hammill’s illumination:

That the conception of socialism in a single country originated with Lenin rather than Stalin.

That Stalin, in the main, carried out Lenin’s policies and so ‘Stalinism’, whether you like it or not, can more accurately be described as Marxism-Leninism in practice.

That putative Trotskyism originated as anti-Leninism and later on became a ‘movement’ via its opposition to the concrete application of Lenin’s theory of socialism in one country.

All this leads Partisan to the position that the question of Stalin is the main demarcation today.

If it were not in such poor political taste I would conclude by remarking that the charge of political zombie-ism could far better be levelled at those who - let it be said, in a most hysterical manner - rush to congregate around the political undead of the SLP social democratic composition.

Ted Hankin
Partisan

Fascist self-determination?

Phil Kent (Weekly Worker 122) states that I “claim” that the link between self-determination and ethnic-cleansing “is inevitable”. I have never made any such claim (and as an English-born Scottish republican and communist nor would I ever!). What I did claim was that by supporting the “rights” of the Bosnian-Serb fascists to ‘self-determination’ you were essentially supporting ethnic-cleansing, as that is what such ‘self-determination’ amounts to.

Does Phil also support the rights of Ulster loyalists claims for ‘self-determination’? I would imagine not. After all the loyalists are racist, fascist, state-sponsored thugs doing a foreign state’s dirty work.

Is it any coincidence that the loyalist tactics for what to do if the Six Counties were handed back to Ireland after an all-Ireland referendum (which, as in Bosnia, could also probably be “ironically referred to as a census”) are openly modelled on Chetnik policies in Bosnia - ie ridding the areas that they control of all ‘ethnically undesirable elements’. Would Phil support them in this?

Phil, far from believing that all sides in the Bosnian conflict are equally reactionary, actually makes it quite plain that he supports the Chetniks. How else could he possibly claim that “the Serbs in Bosnia have just been defeated”?

Some defeat! Essentially, as far as the Chetnik backers in Belgrade are concerned, the war aims of Serbia (in Bosnia) have been accomplished. Serbia now controls half of all Bosnian territory. Half of all that remains (ie, 25% of Bosnia) is, as you correctly point out, annexed by the US/German puppet Croatia and the whole area is directly occupied by US/Nato troops.

As I said in my first letter back in August (Weekly Worker 108): “The Americans ... only want Bosnia to survive if it can be reduced to an ethnically-cleansed muslim rump-statelet that will ultimately be constantly dominated by its two aggressive (and genuinely imperialist-backed) neighbours.”

Is this not exactly what has happened?

James Tait
Edinburgh

Excellent start

Thank you for starting my subscription to the Weekly Worker. After five years reading ‘Trotskyist’ papers it’s been very interesting to read your paper, and the open and wide-ranging nature of the debates is something others could learn from. I’ve also particularly enjoyed the supplements from Jack Conrad.

I look forward to the launch of the eight-page Weekly Worker;the December pilot issue was excellent.

Robert Whitfield
Carlisle

Right to picket

Charges have been brought against members of the Building Worker Group by the Southwark and Bermondsey branch of Ucatt, at the behest of Tony O’Brien, Ucatt convenor at Southwark Direct Labour Organisation building works department. This is because we supported and support two sacked workers and any picket of theirs.

The charges against the BW Group are the utterly reactionary response of O’Brien and some members of his Ucatt branch to the fact that two workers were forced to put a picket on the Frensham Street depot of Southwark building works department. Convenor steward O’Brien refused to back the men, who were sacked for refusing to transfer to a private contractor, Botes. They had taken out a grievance against the transfer, which was not heard before they were sacked!

By attacking us like this O’Brien clearly hopes to divert attention away from the fact he scabbed on these pickets in the most reactionary and disgusting manner and that he is by far the major reason to date why Southwark council has refused to reinstate Johnny and Terry, as well as the council’s grievance procedures. He’d much rather attack the BW Group, Johnny and Terry and the right to picket, than his friends in the DLO building works management and Southwark council.

We call on the regional council to throw out the charges. Defend the right to picket and support the call for a recall mass meeting in Southwark to decide on the industrial action necessary to secure reinstatement of the grievance procedures in line with the last mass meeting and TGWU/EPIU and Ucatt decisions.

Building Worker Group