Letters

Racist? Me?

Steve Cousins says: “Ted Talbot presents a very one-sided view of the sexual grooming issue” (Letters, September 5). It may have been naive of me, but I did not think that there was a ‘positive side’ to gangs that rape, traffic, torture and even kill young girls.

Cousins goes on to say: “I live in a community that had to suffer endless far-right group provocations during the height of the hysteria surrounding these grooming cases.” So it is Cousins who is a victim and anyway why should people get excited about a few thousand rapes? People like Cousins use the term ‘grooming’ because it sounds fairly innocuous, like something that happens in a hairdressers. “For these morons, the complexities of the case and the sensitive issues that arose were not to be considered - all they cared about was spouting their racist filth, sowing divisions and demanding evil be dealt with.”

Perhaps it would have been appropriate at this stage for Cousins to inform us exactly what these “complexities” and “sensitive issues” are. In particular, he could have taken the time to explain how women are not regarded as second-class citizens in Islam and how young white girls are not identified as ‘easy meat’ - nothing could be as racist as Islam towards the ‘kaffir’. Of course, he cannot and therefore is reduced to the tired old trick of hurling personal abuse. In Cousins’ book an Islamist terror attack is not racist, whereas protesting about it is. The messenger is blamed and any criticism of Islam must be denounced as ‘divisive’.

Cousins talks about a “Neanderthal left”. Where is this left? Unfortunately I can see no leftwing protest against Islam, which is to the right of National Socialism in many respects - gays, women and human rights for just a starter.

Cousins states: “… in Britain, I would argue, there is no real working class as such, so leftists desperately flail around, looking for anything that might get the great unwashed onside” (emphasis added). Look at the contempt here for working class people! Whilst the proletariat in Britain (those who produce surplus value) may be small, compared to its historical role, it is still here and the working class as a totality certainly exists, as anyone attempting to travel by train or awaiting post will testify.

In a great finish to display his intellectual credentials, Cousins says: “I could go into the complexities of these grooming cases, but with people like Ted Talbot is there really any point?” No, there really is not, mate, as you have proved in your vile letter that all you can deal with is ad hominem attacks. Cousins has his own ‘truth’ and that is that.

In the same issue of the paper, one Tony Greenstein has worked himself into a lather complaining that criticism of Islam should not be allowed. Exactly the same position as the Islamists. I prefer Rosa Luxemburg’s definition, where she says: “The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.” Much preferable to the ‘freedom to speak if you agree with Tony Greenstein’, which would confine one to a very low intellectual level and a vile moral compass. I would defend Greenstein’s and Cousins’ right to speak, even though they are nonce apologists at least, and nonces at worst.

Greenstein says: “My mentioning of the word ‘paedophile’ was the cue for Talbot to indulge his racist fantasies about Muslims preying on young, white girls.” Islam is not a race and, if the role of these organised crime groups is a fantasy, then whistleblower police detective Maggie Oliver and brave victim Samantha Smith must be involved in one hell of a conspiracy. The government reports are late and inadequate, but even they are forced to admit the existence of these organised crime groups. Greenstein is a liar on the Goebbels model - the bigger the lie, the better.

He opines: “Rape, child sexual abuse and exploitation is a Muslim phenomenon, the product of a particularly misogynist religion whose adherents prey on young white girls.” This seems accurate enough to me. Greenstein says: “There has been massive publicity focusing on groups of Asian men convicted in northern towns of sexual abuse, whilst, at the same time, the abuse of black children by white men has gone unreported and unnoticed.”

This is nonsense. In his ‘Inconvenient truths’ lecture Andrew Norfolk explains that The Times did not mention the existence of Muslim gangs for around four years - paralysed by the thought of being identified as ‘racist’. He argues - correctly, I think - that, if The Times had not been the establishment paper of record, it would not have been possible to break the story at all, in light of the level of abuse and deceit that were displayed. Greenstein says in his usual whataboutery manner that abuse of black children by white men has gone unreported and unnoticed. It seems that the obscurity here is so complete that even Greenstein can provide no evidence of it.

Greenstein says: “I also notice that Talbot made no mention of the serial abuse of children by white Catholic and Protestant priests. Is that abuse a product of religion too or a product of a particular institutional setup? The public school that two of my children went to, Christ’s Hospital, suffered an epidemic of child sexual abuse - all by white men - but Talbot makes no mention of this for some reason.”

This is one of the few true things in Greenstein’s letter. I also did not address the exciting new findings from the James Webb space telescope, indicating that the widely accepted big bang theory may have to be overthrown. Why? Because this was not what I was writing about and as yet one is still allowed to comment without asking Greenstein for permission, galling as this may be to him.

As for Christ’s Hospital School, where Greenstein claims that he sent two of his children, I am not surprised that I had not come across this institution before. With boarding fees at £12,930 a term and day fees from £6,680 a term, it would be, let us be frank, out of my range. It is important to note that some bursaries are available for the petty bourgeoisie who want their kids to work at PWC and not Tesco. Nothing wrong with this, but a major thing that strikes one is what kind of ‘communist’ would want their kid to attend a school where they march in the City of London’s lord mayor’s show? Surely Greenstein is an ‘apple communist’ (red on the outside, white in the middle) - well, a hypocrite. Indeed Christ’s Hospital appears geared towards glorifying British imperialism. More pertinent - the fee-paying sector is notorious for a gamut of sexual perversions well documented by Evelyn Waugh, which any decent parent would wish to keep their child out of.

Peter Manson, the editor of Weekly Worker, intervened to say that my mentioning rape gangs and arguing that the law should apply to all was racist. Nowhere can he argue that it is wrong, but rather suggests that it should not be mentioned. The contempt for young working class females shines through. The policy of the Weekly Worker is simply to ignore negative actions by Muslims - three gays stabbed in a park in Reading was not mentioned, and neither was the more recent vicious attack on Salman Rushdie. The recent ructions in Leicester were kept off the mainstream news for around five weeks before it became obvious that they were nothing to do with cricket and everything to do with Hindu temples being attacked and the wholly legitimate fightback against Muslim pogromists.

Manson makes an interesting point when he says: “the kind of nationalist Islamophobia Talbot was expressing is not only widespread within the working class: it surfaces from time to time amongst elements of the left”. He is, of course, correct that working class people would find people such as Greenstein and Cousins repugnant. Try actually talking to working class women and suggest that Islam would be a good thing for them. Gays would join Britain First et al before they would consider the pro-Islamic left.

If there is a non-Islamic left that actually thinks that women’s rights, gay rights and human rights are more important than kowtowing to Islam, then I would be grateful if Manson could let me know where they are and I would apply to join.

Ted Talbot
email

Post-fascism

Seen from an Italian perspective, Maciej Zurowski’s article is very convincing in its analysis of the election results (‘Atlanticist post-fascist’, October 6). Most importantly, it shows a certain degree of courage in highlighting that the main problem of the upcoming cabinet is not its connection to the neo-fascist past, but its perfect continuity with the previous centre-left and technocratic governments.

As Zurowski correctly wrote, on the core structural questions (international relations with the EU and Nato, no budget shifting, increase of military presence in the Mediterranean to secure the oil flow from Algeria, etc) there is a transversal consensus between all the major political forces in the Italian parliament, and Fratelli d’Italia will not change a single comma of the trajectory of prime minister Mario Draghi. All the potential drama will be diverted toward cultural and moral matters (gender issues and opposition to ‘political correctness’, presidentialism, flat-rate tax), but they are just cheap tricks deployed in order to continue stealing the show of the main competitor, Matteo Salvini (who will most probably stay quiet in the beginning and swallow the bitter pill, and revert to his clownish agitprop in the second half of the term).

In fact, in the domestic realm, one of the key factors of Giorgia Meloni’s success is that, at least in Italy, the first ‘populist moment’ is probably over. After the second phase of the pandemic and the debate opened by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), the myth of ‘stability’ and ‘competence’ has really gained strength in public opinion. Fratelli d’Italia was the only major party of opposition to Draghi’s technocratic government - yet it has tried, successfully, to strike the same overall posture, but with a more ‘conservative’ flavour.

Unsurprisingly, in Brussels FdI is not allied with hard Eurosceptic populists such as Alternative for Germany or Le Pen’s National Rally, but with the European Conservatives and Reformists. Even the youth sections of the party, National Youth and Azione Studentesca, are more focused on training institutional personnel than on being a classic neo-fascist street force (the more muscular groups, such as Casaggì in Florence, are increasingly isolated and exhausted from continuous infighting).

What is noteworthy is that there was always a liberal-conservative tendency in the old Italian Social Movement (MSI), at least since the leadership of Arturo Michelini (1954-69), alongside rather more Caesarist figures such as Giorgio Almirante (who nonetheless tried to maintain some kind of bourgeois respectability - or, as we say here in Italy, play the role of the fascista in doppiopetto: ie, ‘fascist in a double-breasted coat’). The party’s relationship with terrorist groups such as Ordine Nuovo was always difficult.

Indeed, the term ‘post-fascist’ is not new. It was coined in 1994 during the famous Svolta di Fiuggi (‘Fiuggi turn’), where the then MSI leader, Gianfranco Fini, decided to eliminate all references to fascism (corporatism, revolution, street violence, opposition to the US, etc) and open up the party to market liberalisation. By adopting, when inevitable, the label of ‘post-fascist’, Giorgia Meloni only affirms Fini’s embrace of liberalism and translates it into the semi-identitarian language of the middle class. This is different from the localistic approach of the Lega and more aimed at making north Italy a key passage point for transnational capital and high-value added production.

For sure, plenty of fascists, Eurasianists and even boneheads will be galvanised by the success, but they won’t make any difference to the direction of party. Moreover, FdI knows that, if it continues to bow to pressure from the independent Catholic lobby, Comunione e Liberazione, on issues such as abortion restrictions, it will jeopardise the conditional benevolence of the EU and even lose the NRRP.

In conclusion, Zurowki’s article is not only accurate: it also offers a crucial strategic suggestion to the Italian militant left: if we start from the premise that we are dealing with the same old populist-sovereigntist right, and therefore resurrect the same old broad grassroots civic movements, we will miss the point from the outset. Invoking the bogeyman of fascism is not only futile, but helps the enemy to conceal the real dangers: the reproduction of capitalist society by other means.

Andrea Margheriti
Italy

What’s left?

The Italian general election on September 25 was, as I predicted in my last article, a walkover for Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing coalition (‘Opting for electoral suicide’, September 8).

Enrico Letta announced he will resign as leader of the centrist Partito Democratico. However, although he has taken responsibility for the defeat, he has not admitted that it could have been avoided if the PD had dropped their veto on an alliance with the Five Star Movement (M5S). But the key issue was the substance of the party’s line, for which the entire leadership group was collectively responsible - including the PD’s social democratic left wing.

Although the PD tried a half-hearted left turn in the last weeks of the campaign, by repudiating Matteo Renzi’s Jobs Act (which they had all backed at the time), this was constantly contradicted by Letta and others making glowing references to Draghi on national television, and relentlessly attacking former premier Giuseppe Conte when it was blatantly obvious that the main enemy was Meloni. The suggestion that Draghi was about to bring in all sorts of wonderful social democratic measures about the minimum wage and so forth was utterly absurd.

Fratelli d’Italia’s 26% is the highest vote an Italian fascist organisation has ever received in a free election. Meloni completely humiliated her rival and electoral ally, Matteo Salvini (whose Lega only got 8.8% nationally). Nonetheless, she needs his 66 deputies and 29 senators to maintain her parliamentary majority.

The source of FdI’s support is absolutely crucial for any Marxist analysis of the result. In terms of previous electoral allegiances, the result is not quite as awful as one might have feared. 16% of FdI’s vote came from those who had already voted for it in 2018. 30% were former Lega voters, and 20% former Forza Italia voters. 17% had been M5S voters in 2018. Historically, rising fascist organisations tend to attract previous non-voters, as much of the literature about the Nazi electorate in 1930-33 emphasised. FdI does not seem to have made any substantial inroads into the centre-left vote of 2018.

Toby Abse
Italy

All for Lula!

Billboards are taking over the cities these days: “Stop the burning of the forests in Brazil!” “We want vaccines! Out contempt for coronavirus deaths!” “Out, Bolsonaro!”

I see them and I start thinking how all the socialist militants in Brazil in the years of the dictatorship never expected to reach the age we are now going through, with protests returning to the streets. Before, there was the arrest, torture and murder of comrades one after the other, and they came closer and closer to us - to the comrades of the last Friday of Carnival. Why should we be spared? That’s why we all lived under high tension, as if we were in the last hours of the last day. But we survived - only God and the Devil know how.

Now, under a fascist government, problems that we thought were solved come back to the surface. What will become of our rights? What will become of our children’s work? Will there be a world worthy of the name for the new generations? We know the answer to these questions: let’s fight - we cannot submerge into a sea of anguish and hopelessness. The problem is that in the general context of this fascism come questions particular to our age: How can we face the future? What plans will we make? What prospects do we have?

In this respect, it is a repeat of the dictatorship years, in unexpected similarity. However, the answer today is quite different from those days. We have to face the future in the certainty that we must rely on the strength of what we know and believe in. But what plans will we make? We must work to realise the best that we have, sharing and multiplying the lessons we have accumulated. We want that high that 19th century anti-slavery campaigner Joaquim Nabuco expressed so genially at the end: “Doctor, everything but losing consciousness!”

Resistance, which is life, is made in brevity by the actions and work of those who have left and are leaving. But we, the ones who remain, do not have the immobility of waiting for our train. We are the agents of this duration and the train will not arrive with a warning on the loudspeaker: ‘Attention, Mr passenger, your time has come.’ In fact, it might arrive without warning, but the train always belongs to those who stay on it.

That is why our youth are now protesting. We must return to the streets, to the struggle here and now - in words, in actions, in art, in every way. All for Lula!

Urariano Mota
Brazil

Centrist

I enjoyed reading Kevin Bean’s analysis of the Labour Party conference and its associated fringe meetings (‘Sir Keir’s good week’, October 6).

However, I disagree with Kevin’s conclusion that we must relaunch a new version of Labour Against the Witchhunt. It’s obviously a case of trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted - it’s just too late. The right, as Kevin points out, is in complete control of the Labour Party - never again will they let another George Lansbury or Jeremy Corbyn come to be leader.

I hate to have to say this, but we have been wrong and Peter Taaffe has been right - the Labour Party is now a bourgeois party similar to the US Democrats. Just like in America, the trade union links to the British Labour Party is only for window-dressing. The Northites of David North’s Socialist Equality Parties are right when they conclude that the trade unions, including in Britain, are no longer part of the workers’ movement.

As far as Marxists are concerned, the Labour Party is dead. Whilst the idea of transforming Labour in the long term into a united front of a special kind - as Labour Party Marxists call for - is a good one, it is to put the cart before the horse. Instead, what is needed is a mass Communist Party. Marxists should therefore prioritise building such a party instead of trying to transform the Labour Party.

In the meantime, a new centrist party (in the revolutionary sense) just like the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party would enable Marxists to work with centrists in the same way the Bolsheviks worked with the Mensheviks. The basis for a new centrist party will come from the 200,000 people who have cancelled their direct debits to the Labour Party since Sir Keir Starmer became leader. Such a party will grow rapidly. It will form the basis of a mass communist party, which could then set about transforming the Labour Party.

The idea of the CPGB PCC that uniting competing sects, such as the Socialist Party in England and Wales, the Socialist Workers Party, Anti-Capitalist Resistance and Counterfire, into a communist party has been shown to be a complete failure. Relaunching a new version of Labour Against the Witchhunt is no alternative to building a new centrist party similar to the RSDLP.

As Kevin Bean says, a majority Labour government is the most likely outcome of the next general election. However, Marxists must be careful in how they view such a prospect. As the CPGB PCC correctly points out, such a Labour government will be the most rightwing in history. It would therefore be a big mistake for Marxists to call for a Labour vote in the next general election. Far better to use the term, ‘Vote socialist’.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

National Bolshevik

British communists profess a commitment to internationalism and proletarian democracy. Why then do we see a trend toward nationalistic, paternalist and étatiste policy from the Bolshevik left, typified by recent articles in the New Communist Party’s New Worker?

Alongside principled expressions of solidarity with Cuba and Palestine, we also find in its pages declarations of support for the leading lights of the quasi-fascist Eurasia Movement in Russia and, most bizarrely, the following passage, cited approvingly, from a rightwing fringe figure in New York: “they emptied the jails, they shut down Broadway … they made drug use aspirational … they flooded the city with illegal immigrants” and so on and on (NW No 2177). Who “they” are remains unspecified - perhaps the speaker alludes to the paranoiac conception of cosmopolitan elites so common to the populist right, and which should be so very alien to the left.

What underlies this bizarre reactionary shift from the self-appointed vanguard of our class? One is the staunch, effectively Hoxhaist anti-revisionism of the NCP and its ilk, which is so very unpalatable to the working masses. The complete unworkability of their clinginess to the personalities of Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, etc, with no possible scope for revaluation of their legacy or ideas, forces the arch-Bolshevists into strange coalitions - after failing, as they always do, to win footholds in the institutional left, let alone society at large.

There is a second inflow of ideas that shapes the current direction of the NCP, this one requiring deeper exposition. In short, a new current is beginning to run through the left - what has been termed by the likes of Joti Brar (of the CPGB-ML) and philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller as “anti-wokeism”. This counter-cultural variant of leftism breaks substantially from the liberal worldview (contrastingly, the likes of Momentum or the Democratic Socialists of America are saturated with it) in the following ways:

1. its class-oriented critique of identity politics, representationalism and intersectionality;
2. its preferential opinion on the working classes, populism and the labour grassroots;
3. its scepticism of open borders and critical race theory, and its revaluation of the role of the nation-state as a potential vehicle for socialism.

This emergent tradition is exemplified by organisations from George Galloway’s Worker’s Party to Markus Allard’s Örebropartiet in Sweden, news outlets such as the Bellows and independent podcasts Low Society, Red Scare and many others. Rightwing and mainstream press tend to designate them as the “anti-woke left” (Spiked 2019), as do some of its advocates, but a more accurate description might be the workerist, ‘class first’ or even neo-syndicalist left.

The NCP clearly shares the view that organisation on the basis of identity is insufficient to liberate the working class - and in this they are correct. Only the united labour movement, operating democratically in the economic and political spheres, can deliver the momentum to overcome class society and its inevitable epiphenomenon of poverty, iniquity, wage-slavery and the like. Yet they fail to make inroads with the emerging current of workerism - after all, workerist leftists tend also to believe in freedom of speech, the autonomy of working class institutions, the sanctity of human life - all unacceptable in a Stalinist framework. In this sense the new workerists stand closer to Victor Serge, with his belief in the moral authority of the proletariat, than they do to Lenin and his vanguardism.

What then remains for the NCP, and their co-reactionists, Spiked magazine (shunned as they are by the institutional left and the counter-culture alike)? Only the allure of Putin, of Dugin, of the siren-song of national Bolshevism - these are the few remaining political forces that might even consider tolerating them. Likewise with the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist), with its close ties to the National Bolshevik ‘other Russia’ movement - and even the Spartacists, who call for the complete laying down of arms in Ukraine, indicating nothing more than total capitulation to the reactionary forces of Russian (ie, bourgeois) plutocracy.

If it is to regain and retain its relevance, the left must heed the critiques from the workerist revival. It must shed itself of liberal-academic jargon, which in the words of the DSA-affiliated Marxist Unity Group serves only to foster “a pseudo-radical and easily cooptable variant of identity politics, which sheds the overt pro-capitalism, but is bound at the hip to the state through the same politics of representation” (‘For a disciplined revolutionary party’, Weekly Worker September 22). It must return its focus to the economic base, to the workers themselves, as only they can become the final gravediggers of capital.

Regarding issues like Ukraine, Taiwan, Kurdistan, the European Union and Nato, we must, of course, respect the rights of nations to self-determination, but never should throw ourselves behind every second or third world dictator in a doctrinaire programme of anti-westernism, just because they happen to have a scrap with the USA. This is nothing but historical materialism with all the ‘history’ gouged out! Further, in going forward, we must remain on guard against the kind of sectarian neo-Stalinism that so often degenerates into insipid, even outright, national Bolshevik reactionism. We must reject outright the disturbing line trotted out by the so-called ‘left’ supporters of the Putin-Dugin clique, reject the bureaucratism of party dictatorship that masquerades as proletarian democracy, and denounce the myths of national and ethnic exceptionalism spewed by the nationalist media of Russia, bafflingly adopted by some of our ‘comrades’ in the communist sects.

This is to say nothing of the impracticable doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, which no doubt is a further contributor to the NCP’s isolation, to its ever further retreat into the ideological bunkers of Stalinism and national Bolshevism. “Industry,” wrote James Connolly, “transcends all limitations of territory and leaps across rivers, mountains and continents.” We should, therefore, as we of the syndicalist tradition have always done, seek the creation of proletarian coalitions on the basis of economic struggle, in defiance of the political state and the narrow confines of geographic territories - themselves the product of millennia of ruling class warfare and, therefore, completely illegitimate - whilst always repudiating the poisonous teachings of Stalinism and its unlikely bedfellow, which some communists call ‘patriotism’ or ‘self-determination of nations’, but which is known to all others on the left by its true name: ‘national chauvinism’.

Johnny Walker
email