Letters

Our own choice

Although Paul Demarty is, of course, wise to point to possible difficulties with any new law that deals with matters of life and death, I strongly believe he is wrong in his arguments against the legalisation of assisted suicide (‘Slope really is slippery’ November 28). I speak as an older, partially disabled, person who is in pain every day of her life. I am not about to commit suicide - well, not yet anyway - but I do want that choice, that possibility.

He prefers the phrase, “euthanasia”, with a subtype of “assisted suicide”. The National Health Service defines euthanasia as “the act of deliberately ending a person’s life to relieve suffering”. It gives as an example a doctor deliberately giving a patient with a terminal illness a drug they do not otherwise need … with the sole aim of ending their life. It does not specify if the patient has asked for, or is even aware of, the doctor’s actions.

Assisted suicide, however, is defined as “deliberately assisting another person to kill themselves”. The two are not the same, or even a subset of one another, and even the possible penalties are different.

I certainly agree that healthcare and end-of-life care should be excellent, and palliative care available to anyone who needs or wants it. Both of my grandmothers died in their late 90s, needing (and getting) a great deal of care in the (privatised) healthcare system in the US. My step-grandmother, however, committed suicide, because she could not bear the idea of the pain preceding her impending death.

This was her choice. She did not consult anyone, nor was she helped by her doctor. My step-grandmother chose her manner of so doing. Was she afraid of dying in an undignified manner and as a burden to her family? Possibly. But, as she did not discuss it with anyone, we never knew. And this I believe: although, of course, in a better society the pain would be taken care of and the death dignified, I doubt very much that even this would stop people from committing suicide.

Paul Demarty ends his piece with the view that assisted suicide shows that “society considers the meeting of certain needs either beyond its capacity or not worth the bother”. But in the cases I know of people who have committed suicide (and I personally have known four) it is a choice they, individually, have made.

The same argument of a slippery slope, those of us old enough to remember, was made both originally in the legalisation of contraceptives and, latterly, of abortion. Legalising contraceptives would lead to out-of-wedlock babies, because women (not men, of course) would no longer be afraid of sex outside of marriage. Legalising abortion would lead to women being promiscuous, because they knew they could get rid of any result of promiscuity - a slippery slope where babies would be murdered in the womb or after birth, etc.

The arguments made for both freely available contraception and abortion were those of autonomy - a woman’s right to decide what should happen to her body (let’s leave aside any discussion of male autonomy here). Yes, limits were placed on when abortion could happen, and how and when young people should have access to contraceptives. Those debates are still ongoing in many places, but in most western countries the idea that women should have that choice has been made legal.

Whatever other countries have done or are doing might be interesting, in my view, but is not necessarily important in the discussion of what is happening here. Britain outlawed hanging before many other countries did so. Should we have continued it, because giving convicted criminals parole means they are going to commit the same crimes again? Texas certainly thinks so.

And, once assisted suicide is made legal, the numbers deciding to commit suicide will increase - when it is illegal, many are afraid of legal consequences if they are not successful. I have not noticed, however, in the past that people deciding to commit suicide have been stopped by it being illegal. We, after all, even have examples of Marxists so doing.

As I understand the new law, two doctors and a judge will have to agree to anyone wishing to avail themselves of assisted suicide. Again as I understand it, this is the most restrictive law by any country so far. We do not know, of course, what will happen after the law has been through committee, the Lords, etc, but we do know that many in Britain want the same choice that I want: to be able to make an informed and unafraid choice, when and if I feel enough is enough.

Gaby Rubin
London

Final goodbye?

Comrade Jack Conrad’s response (Letters, November 14) to my questioning of some of the formulations in his article, ‘Searching for solutions’ (July 4), leaves much unanswered.

He denies the subsumption of Palestinian national identity within a broader Arab one. He writes: “We recognise Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, etc identities, but we also recognise the wider Arab nation …” All well and good, but, while we have witnessed a flare in the Syrian civil war, only the Palestinian members of this “wider Arab nation” are subjected to a genocidal, colonial-settler crusade to expel them from their homeland.

Comrade Conrad goes on to suggest a pan-Arab socialist republic should “offer the Israeli-Jewish working class some sort of federal arrangement”. A federal arrangement requires borders, but he leaves it to the future to decide where these might be drawn. Nonetheless, he does make two contradictory proposals.

He suggests that “an Israeli socialist republic would include areas where there is a clear Hebrew majority”. Given the rate at which Israel is settling in the West Bank, this would suggest the whole of mandate Palestine minus a rump Gaza Strip (if this has not been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians prior to the putative Arab revolution). And where does this leave the longstanding demand for a Palestinian right of return? When will these ‘majorities’ be calculated? Before the revolution? After the revolution? Before Palestinians have exercised their right to return or after?

However, as an immediate demand, comrade Conrad would call for Israel to “cease seeding the West Bank with colonists and withdraw from all occupied territories”. Worthy and wholly supportable demands. However, the chances the existing Zionist state will do so are vanishingly small.

Further, putting to one side the fact that the creation of the state of Israel required the occupation of swathes of Palestinian territory, the original division of mandate Palestine created a fractured patchwork of isolated territories with no geographical coherence. Withdrawing from “all [post-1967] occupied territories” would reproduce the territorial incoherence of the 1948 settlement. Am I to take it from this that Conrad supports the creation of an Israeli-Palestinian socialist canton republic along the lines proposed by Steve Freeman?

It may well be that there is no solution to Israel/Palestine other than the maximum demand of socialism. If that is true, then it would seem inevitable that the Palestinians are doomed to be permanently expelled from their homeland. The socialist Arab republic’s offer of a “federal arrangement” to the Israeli-Jewish working class will be the final coup de grâce of Palestinian nationhood.

Andy Hannah
email

Action blockade

Palestine Action have returned to the Edinburgh premises of Leonardo - using vans to blockade the weapons factory and halt its contributions to genocide. At the time of writing Scottish activists were secured to each other on top of the vehicles, closing both entry gates to the plant and preventing the manufacture of parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets.

The Italian-owned company, Leonardo, is one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers, with extensive ties to the Israeli state. Since 2015, the Edinburgh plant has manufactured the laser-targeting systems for F-35s - the model used by Israel to drop 2,000-pound bombs on the Palestinian population of Gaza. Additionally, Leonardo makes parts for Israel’s Apache helicopters, while also maintaining deep partnership with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company, for the purposes of supplying its airforce.

Between 2016 and 2020, Leonardo received £7 million from the Scottish government, rendering it complicit in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. In closing down the Leonardo factory, Palestine Action has sent a clear message to the British and Scottish governments - we will not stand idly by, as the war industry of Britain fuels and profits from Israel’s atrocities.

Palestine Action have struck at the Edinburgh Leonardo plant on numerous occasions since October 2023, including through occupations, blockades and acts of sabotage. A spokesperson said: “While the British and Scottish governments continue to support the Israeli war industry, Palestine Action refuse to permit complicity. By shutting down Leonardo in Edinburgh, these activists are preventing the production of Palestinian slaughter.”

Palestine Action
email

Out of steam

In November 2023 Socialist Appeal announced its highest ever membership total (1,101), as it began preparations for its transformation into the Revolutionary Communist Party the following year. A month later leader Rob Sewell declared the party was “determined to double the size of our organisation by the end of 2024. We need 2,000 well-trained communists - or more.”

In early May the founding congress of the RCP reported a modest increase in membership to 1,150, yet boldly declared its next milestone was “10,000 members”. Just a few days ago (December 5), the RCP gave its latest membership total as 1,210, making a net increase of just 109 in a year marked inter alia by frequent and large pro-Palestinian demonstrations, a UK general election, the continuation of war in Ukraine and the rise of the populist and far right across the world.

The discrepancy between the RCP’s increasingly frenetic claims about world politics and its astonishingly modest achievements is stark in the extreme.

John Kelly
email

Digital flower

Mike Macnair’s continual claims that online publications can’t be agenda-setting are beginning to become tedious, to the point at which I’m beginning to think he has shares in a Finnish paper mill (‘What sort of partyism?’ December 5). In this context, I’m talking about online publications, not social media.

Part of the issue here, alongside a more general fetish of the print form, is that the comrade, like most of his group and many older leftists, have zero understanding of how the bourgeois media now works and there is an assumption (tailored to suit factions who want to ‘carry on regardless’ with the old routine) that print is still the core focus of established (or establishment) organisations.

Bourgeois media organisations that continue with print have gone through a number of iterations; an earlier one represented a bifurcation, where either print and online became different publications (as with the famous example of the Mail) or print production processes were split from online ones and, in the latter, it was thought that a ‘light touch’ and letting reporters sub their own work would be fine (oh, how we sub-editors laughed).

As bourgeois organisations started putting online content behind paywalls, it became immediately apparent that the quality of that content had to match the higher production standards of print. This led many London media hubs to start rebuilding production teams and I found (much to my surprise) that my subbing skills were suddenly in high demand. And, as publications began competing for online subscribers, the scramble thus started to compete with one another to set the online news agenda (these days by the minute). Waiting for the paper to come out the next day would be an act of commercial suicide, given the decline in print sales and subscribers, and the millions of pounds of online subscriptions.

Therefore, where I work, lead stories (or ‘splashes’) are platform-neutral and gestate online; print will be an iteration of the online splash - sometimes with an alternative, more telegraphic, headline. Online goes first, always, and the paper is used to distil, amplify and condense key messages from the earlier bout of online agenda-setting. There are situations where the paper can do things better than online (ie, a double-page picture spread of royal pageantry or a tactical diagram of a football game), but those instances are rare. So, commercially, print still has a role to play, but it is heavily mediated by online demands, and agenda-setting in the bourgeois media is done online. Think, for example, of the recent scandal around TV presenter Gregg Wallace, which has been thoroughly led online, given that’s where celebrity news largely happens these days. Online production teams rely on the same sense of collectivity as the old print subs and can form highly effective ‘scaffolds’.

Of course, nothing happens much in far-left sect cocoons for most of the time, so you might still be able to get away with a once-a-week dump of this and that online. It’s hardly a hotbed and sects move at glacial pace. However, say that there was a communist group like the early CPGB with around 5,000 members with some scope to have an impact on the labour movement as a whole. The whole idea that comrade Macnair appears to be promoting - that we can rely on something that merely replicates the current singular production set-up of the Weekly Worker (lord, save us) to set agendas in the future - is a virulent sect fantasy.

Future communist media will be dealing with audiences shaped by our online world (a world in which print still has a very precise and useful function) and imparting rationality and longer-form arguments to save comrades from the current hurricane of spontaneous drivel that currently pollutes much online far-left discourse. A huge chunk of that work will need to be done through a rich diversity of online publications, whether older comrades like it or not. Let a thousand digital flowers bloom.

Lawrence Parker
London

Anti-migrant

If I were to vote in the German general elections, currently scheduled for February 2025, I would strongly consider voting for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, if for no other reason than that a strong showing for her group would throw a spanner in the works of western imperialism’s geopolitical aims.

However, considering her anti-migrant chauvinism, I question whether I could reconcile such a vote with my conscience. Wagenknecht is quoted as saying in an interview with the German news magazine Stern: “I expect the Syrians in our country who celebrate the Islamist takeover to return to their homeland as soon as possible.”

I see little difference between her attitude and the chauvinism of German liberals, for whom refugees are ‘welcome’ as long as they don’t hold the wrong views on Israel.

Marek Kowalski
Turin