Letters

Trans freedom

Comrade Brunhilda O of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation in Australia raises the issue of trans liberation (Letters July 25 2024). She complains that the CPGB’s Draft programme “fundamentally fails to touch on the issue” and that the RCOs Road to power is altogether superior.

I am not going to comment on the RCO’s four demands around the issue (all of which are more than worthy of an extended discussion). Instead, I am going to defend the CPGB’s Draft programme.

Section 3.16 on ‘Sexual freedom’ says this:

Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, etc have often been scapegoated or persecuted. They are portrayed as threats to timeless religious values, sexual norms and the nuclear family - the basic economic unit of capitalist society.

Bigoted attitudes divide the working class and aid those advocating the authoritarian state. The working class needs to be mobilised in order to defend and advance sexual freedom.

Communists demand:

•  Decriminalisation of all consensual sexual practices. End police and state harassment.
•  Lesbian women and gay men should be accorded the same rights in society as heterosexuals: that is, state marriages, artificial insemination for lesbians, adoption and fostering. No discrimination in custody cases on the grounds of sexual orientation.
•  No discrimination in any area of employment.
•  Decriminalisation of prostitution so as to remove it from criminal control.
•  For the self-organisation of prostitutes to improve their conditions. Prostitutes to be provided with special healthcare and other services to reduce the dangers they confront. Measures must be put in place to give prostitutes wider social opportunities.

The purpose of the communist programme is to provide a broad strategic approach, to state basic principles … and nothing more. Many, even important issues, will be left out and can be, should be, dealt with elsewhere. In articles, resolutions, by special commissions, etc. The programme itself should be as short as possible.

Hopefully, with that in mind, when comrade Brunhilda next reads our Draft programme, instead of finding what’s not there, she will find what’s really there: opposition to discrimination, championing of freedom.

Jack Conrad
London

Welcome here

My 89-year-old mum has just come out of hospital after having been admitted due to a fractured knee following a fall. She can no longer walk and needs a hoist to get her in and out of bed and off and onto a chair and wheelchair.

My mum has two carers, who come in four times a day - working 14 hours a day, five days a week. These carers come from a wide range of countries: Zimbabwe, India, Ghana and Nigeria. I’m not allowed to give them money, but I am able to give them boxes of chocolates from time to time! They are all very friendly, helpful and hardworking.

My experience of meeting these carers has affected me deeply and changed my view on immigration controls, which I now oppose. I therefore think it was wrong for Marxists to support George Galloway’s red-brown Workers Party of Britain, which opposes migrants and wants the Royal Navy to sink the boats of migrants making their way across the Channel.

Just like Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the WPB must be fought, given the anti-migrant poison they have introduced into politics within the UK. My view now is that all migrants are welcome here.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Communism?

I read Marcus Strom’s review in last week’s edition of David Lockwood’s book, The politics of the Malayan Communist Party from 1930 to 1948 (‘Flip-flopping programmatically’, July 25).

For me the Malayan Communist Party was merely an independence movement with overtures to communist ideals as a means of garnering support from an always gullible and mostly politically clueless population. I’ve read Chin Peng’s biography, Alias Chin Peng: my side of history, and found little attention to communist aspirations. Most of the active members of the MCP during the long campaign were solely mercenaries.

I can understand how a burgeoning ‘communist’ movement needs to rely on secrecy and what I think is called ‘democratic centralism’ - which is a euphemism for ‘anything but’. But therein lies the danger of a movement reliant on non-democratic means of establishing power and then, once in power. ‘struggling’ to establish democracy. It’s like expecting a group of alcoholics taking over a brewery to suddenly embrace teetotalism - good luck with that strategy.

I’ve also read The private life of Chairman Mao by Zhisui Li, who was Mao’s private physician for most of his reign of power. The Chinese Communist Party may as well have called themselves the ‘Chinese Monarchist Party’, judging by the way Mao was monarchised (or deified) post-1949 until his death in 1976.

Private enterprise has always been “indispensable”, in Mao’s own words, to the Chinese economy. Today, maybe the top 500 Chinese companies are state-owned (a few hundred thousand state-owned enterprises in total and another few hundred thousand partly state-owned), but the vast bulk of the 40 million registered firms in China today are privately owned. There’s communism for you! Communism seems to mean anything that anyone can attach to it.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army have dabbled in socialist rhetoric, varying according to time and place, throughout their existence. Talking to Irish republicans today, one daren’t mention anything about reform of the financial system or tinkering with the economic foundations of society, as such ideas interfere with the short-term goal of Irish unity. It’s all part of a ‘process’, you see. Firstly, ‘independence’ and then we can talk about ‘socialism’, as the British influence will be out of the way. Probably, Chin Peng thought the same thing.

But, when Malaya gained ‘independence’ in 1957, British influence (or should we say ‘capital influence’?) remained. After what we may describe as ‘Irish independence’ (anything but) discussion of socialism will more likely be outlawed than initiated. Platitudes to socialism-cum-communism are 99% used to hoodwink people into supporting independence movements, or essentially just to support seizures of power by one grouping against other competing groupings vying to be the executives for the shadowy elite who run everything, control the money supply, own the vast majority of media outlets, control the foundations whose benefaction essentially controls the charitable and NGO sectors, who atop the secret societies and the vast power that that entails.

In fact, for me the nearest thing to communism comes from Michael Albert’s Parecon and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Both at least explain what a decent society could be like. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and ‘Goofy’ didn’t do this. Lenin’s ‘April theses’ was more an opportunistic attempt to bandwagon popularist sentiment rather than his deeply held beliefs, because, up until that time and after, Lenin’s views and actions were anything but related to socialism/communism: “If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least 500 years.” Ah ... he was such an icon, was he not?

Ironically, although the Soviet Union didn’t have the best of starts, due to having despots like Lenin leading the charge, it did develop into state capitalism of a type that I personally see as preferable to other state-capitalist experiments across the world at that time, or since. I would rather have lived in the Soviet Union during the 1960s and 70s rather than El Salvador - or even Scotland for that matter. A near guarantee of a home, a job, subsidised heating and all the other benefits for me is better than the precarious lifestyles of most people living in other state-capitalist adventures seen around the world at the same time in all the various countries.

Has anyone ever watched, Just a boy’s game written by Peter McDougall, with the leading role played by Frankie Miller? Jesus Christ! Give me the Soviet Union any time rather than that hellhole. I know it’s only ‘fiction’, but it’s based on some type of reality, as is much fiction - even science fiction.

But don’t confuse the Soviet Union with communism (as one shouldn’t confuse the X-Factor with entertainment). A dog born in a barn doesn’t make it a horse. Communism is always just over the horizon - ‘Let’s just experience a little more capitalism, comrades, and then we’ll establish communism!’ Anything but!

Louis Shawcross
County Down

Segregation

I know there is a lot of shooting, swimming, running, etc going on at the moment, but should one’s brain wish to visit the higher pursuits for a short period of time, ‘PBS’ has some illuminating documentaries.

PBS stands for Public Broadcasting Service, and is the one and only national TV channel in the US that accepts no advertisements. What it does do is accept money from various trusts, and membership from ordinary people like me. Many of the glam programmes you see on television here are made with the help of PBS or (usually) GBH, the Boston flagship (‘grievous bodily harm’ does not exist as the name of a crime in the USA!).

A documentary about Mississippi - the state with the most violent history during the fight for desegregation of all of the southern states - is a case in point. The harvest: integrating Mississippi’s schools charts the path of the fight for desegregation in the schools after the ‘Brown vs the Board of Education’ decision, at a time when the Supreme Court was a little more sensitive, following through with the murders of Martin Luther King and John F Kennedy. The schools became desegregated, and parents and students testify as to what it was like sharing a bathroom with people of a different colour for the first time in your life. It looks as though the racial divide is at last diminishing. Hope! There is hope!

And then the documentary moves through the years until now.

If one takes the pessimist view of a half glass of wine, then Mississippi is now an empty glass. Because of white flight and/or the emergence of private schools, the schools in Mississippi are now segregated again. Some of the state’s living conditions have changed, of course. There is a black middle class. Black and white people do eat in the same restaurants at the same time. There is not the same amount of open brutality over black people voting - although voter nullification is having to be fought now. But the schools have gone back to the ‘good old days’, with black children in state schools and white children in private schools.

When people ask me about the reasons for the Molotov cocktail-like explosiveness of race relations in the US, it usually takes me a little time to go through the history of slavery and slave rebellions, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the early 1900s and lynching, the struggle for the parity of black service men and women and factory workers during World War II and the civil rights movement. From now on I’ll save my breath and just tell people to watch the PBS documentary on Mississippi’s schools.

Gaby Rubin
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