Letters

A game of two halves

I enjoyed reading Phil Sharpe’s article on the European football championships (Weekly Worker July 4) although I disagreed with almost all of it.

It seems Phil has allowed the coverage of football on television and in the tabloids to mediate between the game and his own Marxist analysis. This has resulted in a virtual critique of football and music, resembling Jean Baudrillard’s frictionless philosophical world.

The most striking aspect of the article is his inability to understand the working class presence in the sport and the pressure it is under from capitalist rationalisation. In his haste to convert opinions into truth, the most vital element in football has disappeared. Phil is keen to prove “the cultural class unity of the white collar wimp (‘Men behaving badly’, Baddiel and Skinner, Chris Evans) with the lumpen football hooligan”, to illustrate his point that Euro 96 “has ideologically represented a cultural counterrevolution”. Phil thinks that the sudden bringing together of these groups has resulted amongst other things in an “arrogant refusal to accept the technical and organisational merit of a German team” in favour of a “fetishised emotional capacity to momentarily overcome a sense of social and political powerlessness through alienating and projecting mythical power onto 11 sporting individuals”.

This merely turns the problem over, repeats the error and fetishises technique over human emotion - making it seem as if football and music could be a site where pure error were possible, instead of being a living process complexly linked with ideology, myth, emotional resonance and creativity. Rather like Tony Adams marking Klinsmann, Phil is off the pace. His suggestion that Marxists need to realise “this is the first serious attempt by the ruling class to use post-war popular music for its own ideological agenda” is absurd. There is an Adornesque case to be made that all post-war popular music is by definition ideologically owned by the ruling class. Even without this negative dialectic one song by one band coinciding with one football tournament does not equal the first “attempt to suppress the spontaneously proletarian and internationalist content to creative musical forms”. This is looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope - a long way from the subject, just like every armchair football philosopher.

Phil is right that we need to develop Marxist theoretical criteria, but he is wrong to think that we need them to “identify the most progressive and proletarian aspects of modern music and sport” (my italics). This implies Marxists playing ‘spot the progressive sport’ - a pastime that reflects his distance from active proletarian participation (playing and supporting) in football and a reified desire for the form of the media spectacle to contain all of cultural life.

John Atyeo
Bristol

British humiliated?

Your ‘peace’ bomb article (Weekly Worker June 20) reads like a case history of the Trot mindset. You are determined to see defeat (ie, Revolution Betrayed) whatever happens so that you can mentally wallow in ‘perfect revolution’ fantasy.

Why avoid the simpler explanation that the Docklands and Manchester guerrilla war operations were a continuation of the 25 years of previous guerrilla war? Because that would undermine your determination to believe that Sinn Fein/IRA have sold out. Hence, ‘peace’ bombs.

As ‘proof’ you quote a republican source saying, “No ceasefire unless Sinn Fein is at the talks”. But forcing British imperialism into a negotiated retreat from the original gerrymandered ‘no surrender’ partition was precisely the aim of the national liberation struggle - so how does forcing talks on procrastinating London equal sell-out?

These 1996 IRA operations were “not a breakaway aimed at restarting the war against British imperialism”, you say. No, they are part of the same war. It has not ended yet. The only confusion is in your heads. What you are really trying to say is that what has not restarted is a revolutionary socialist war. True, but ludicrously irrelevant. It has always been a national liberation war, but, for all that, a mighty blow against imperialism nevertheless. And not sold out, or defeated.

It was indeed “a very loud knock at the negotiating door”, as you say with another sneer. But how does it differ from 25 years of previous loud knocking (other than becoming more damaging and dismaying to imperialism than ever)?

The republican movement “left isolated”? It has succeeded in putting unprecedented international pressure on imperialism in recent years, culminating in at last forcing new deal talks (after 75 years of ‘no surrender’ obduracy, maintaining the fictitious ‘separate country’ of ‘Northern Ireland’); and winning 40% of the Irish voting strength now in the occupied zone, an astonishing achievement against the modern world’s anti-terrorist propaganda. What wouldn’t the CPGB give to be just a fraction as “isolated” among English workers.

Exactly when did the IRA become a ‘victim’ of the New World Order? And what mortal blow was struck by imperialism precisely? You can no more put a date and place on this defeatist fantasy than Trotskyism ever could on the development in the 1920s which was supposed to prove that the Soviet Union had ceased to be a workers’ state building socialism and had “sided” - via the Comintern - with “the bourgeois order” to take a “cynical counterrevolutionary role” (Transitional Programme 1938).

You have the defeatist mentality of the petty-bourgeois ‘left’ which rallied to Trotsky, whose slanders began as early as the 1923 New Course, declaring that nothing now lay ahead of the Soviet workers’ state but “ossification”, and by 1940 was dementedly gloating about “the new aristocracy’s ... incapacity to conduct a war (‘Stalin - Hitler’s quartermaster’) and that “Stalin cannot make a war with the discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army” (‘German-Soviet Alliance’); and that “The level of the USSR’s productive forces forbids a major war” (‘The twin star: Hitler-Stalin’).

As German imperialism discovered after wiping out ‘advanced’ West Europe, some “ossification”!

Only the Trotskyite petty-bourgeois defeatist mentality could treat the overthrow of apartheid as a setback, as you do. Imperialism only retreated to a peaceful settlement with the ANC to avoid an even worse revolutionary defeat later on. The same in Ireland. But these are not defeats but victories over imperialism, by revolutionary armed struggle.

Your conclusion - ‘Without the British working class behind it, Irish national liberation can’t win’ - is the heart of your problem. Marxist science declares a completely contrary reality: that until Britain is forced to concede Ireland its full independence, then the British working class will never break away from imperialist domination (see Economic and Philosophic Science Review 858).

Real life is proving it. The more British ‘control’ gets humiliated by the IRA and Sinn Fein, the more British people say, ‘Get out of Ireland’.

Your sour defeatism undermines the national liberation struggle. Marxist recognition of its titanic achievements cheers it on.

Roy Bull
Manchester

Storm hits Bolivian labour congress

On June 27 the congress of the COB (Bolivian Labour Confederation) ended in the defeat of the moderate left and pro-government leadership. Oscar Salas was the executive leader of the COB who betrayed the last three general strikes that extended for around one month (March 1994, March 1995 and March 1996). He is a member of the Socialist Democratic Alternative (ASD), a rightwing split from the Communist Party, and he led a coalition composed by the parties that are in the neo-liberal government (like the former Maoists of the FRI and the MBL).

Salas lost the election to a left coalition led by Oscar ‘Hurricane’ Ramirez. Ramirez led a left split from the Communist Party. He advocates the rejection of the elections and preparing for an armed uprising. The miners, teachers, peasants and more radicalised sectors supported him. Immediately after the elections for the main posts on the COB’s executive committee the pro-government forces led by Salas used violence to sabotage it. This led to the suspension of the congress for two months.

In that congress Poder Obrero (the Bolivian section of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International) participated, leading the delegation of a small national union. We fought against the pro-government forces, but we also criticised Ramirez. Despite his militancy he wants a new radical version of a popular front, he is in a bloc with the Stalinist CP and he could make concessions to his former comrade, Salas, and his grouping.

The COB congress resolved a campaign for the freedom of 40 political prisoners, including Lucio Gonzales, number three of the COB leadership who was jailed in January 1996, miners’ leaders like Macario Tola and Victor Ortiz, Felipe Quispe and other peasant leaders, etc. We call on all our brothers and sisters in Britain to help us in that campaign.

Martin Mamani
Poder Obrero, Bolivia

Hillingdon justice

On October 1 1995, 56 Asian women domestic workers at Hillingdon Hospital went on strike against the loss of wages and appalling conditions being imposed by Pall Mall Hotel Services, a private contractor which has taken over almost all ancillary services at Hillingdon Hospital. For the strikers, many of whom have worked at the hospital for more than l5 years, this is the third time they have been faced with a pay cut from blood-sucking private contractors.

Pall Mall took over the contract in October 1995 and openly stated that they would no longer abide by European legislation, which protects the wages and conditions of workers in the public sector. They then tried to enforce even more exploitative contracts on the already low-paid workers. The new contracts amount to a 20% cut in wages.

These contracts were ‘offered’ to all ancillary workers, who were told to sign them or be sacked. Following this the mainly white catering staff and porters were bought off with offers of £1,000 each if they signed.

The domestic workers refused to sign the contracts. Pall Mall have resorted to open intimidation and taken all possible measures to break the strike.

The outcome of the struggle at Hillingdon has important implications for all of us. The onslaught of privatisation policies and rapacious private contractors is destroying our essential services and our basic rights as workers - the very trade union rights which have been won through years of struggle. It is now more important than ever to resist these attacks.

In the current climate, to win a strike workers need their union’s commitment to go all out for victory. Unison’s general secretary Rodney Bickerstaffe’s recent comment, “The union could not do much more to win this strike - it’s all up to the community”, does not suggest such a commitment to victory.

What the workers need is mass support, not isolation. Is Hillingdon going to be the latest in a long history of strikes, from Imperial Typewriters to Grunwicks to Burnsalls, in which Asian women had to push their unions every inch of the way?

South Asia Solidarity Group
London