Letters
Censorship
A new film about censorship, Censoring Palestine, is itself under attack by secret censors out to suppress it. A number of screenings have been dropped at short notice following ‘back-doors pressure’ being put on the venues.
In the last few weeks we have received reports of three screenings being axed in different parts of the country because of pressure being put on the venues. Venues are told to drop the film or ‘there’ll be trouble’. This is the most crude and malicious form of censorship - the worst kind because it’s secret.
The documentary, which is the work of London-based Platform Films, investigates allegations that mainstream media has consistently failed to tell the truth about what’s happening in Palestine and that counter-terrorism laws are being abused to stop people speaking out. It includes contributions from Ken Loach, Roger Waters, Alexei Sayle and two mothers of imprisoned pro-Palestine activists.
Platform, which in the past has made programmes for the BBC and Channel 4, is also the producer of the film Oh Jeremy Corbyn - the big lie, which was itself subject to extraordinary attempts to stop it from being screened in 2023, including most famously being axed by the Glastonbury Festival after an online campaign led by pro-Israel lobby groups.
I believe the reasons behind the attacks on Censoring Palestine are at bottom the same as the attacks on our film about Jeremy Corbyn. We are trying to tell the truth about what’s happening in Palestine and there are people and organisations out there who just don’t want that truth told. But whatever happens we will carry on. Screenings of the films are continuing across the country, from Penzance to Glasgow, and we will carry on supporting them. We need to get the truth out there.
I, together with the film’s director, Chris Reeves, will be speaking live about the attempts to censor the film at a screening of Censoring Palestine in the Palace Cinema in Broadstairs, Kent at 7pm on Sunday March 23. Tickets are available at thepalacecinema.co.uk.
See a trailer of the film at:
Norman Thomas
Producer
CPGB and SPEW
In Jack Conrad’s supplement article, ‘Trump greenlights ethnic cleansing’, he misleadingly states that the position of the Socialist Party in England and Wales is for a “socialist two-state solution”, when in fact it is: “For an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with guaranteed democratic rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East.” In other words, it is essentially the same position as he argues for (or could be read as such): a united socialist federation of the region, in which Israel would be just one part.
As to the question of what the precise borders would be between the ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Israeli’ republics (or indeed whether somehow their territories could overlap) - this is a question for a future democratic process between them to resolve.
Conrad says that Israel withdrawing from the occupied territories should be a minimum demand, which implies acceptance of pre-1967 as at least a starting point to that process. Again, this is our position.
This brings me to your general attitude towards SPEW: I have been reading the Weekly Worker and have agreed with its basic arguments on democratic republican Marxism since before I even joined the Socialist Party. I must say that I did not find good enough arguments in your paper for me not to join SPEW, much less to join the CPGB instead.
For one thing, SPEW’s programme includes transforming the UK into a democratic federal republic, whereby MPs are subject to instant recall, etc. It may go into less detail than the CPGB-PCC Draft programme, but this is not a substantive difference. Both SPEW and the CPGB-PCC want a mass party, which allows open public factions to have their own newspapers, etc. SPEW’s strategy is to achieve this through uniting existing groups and trades unions through the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, or some other future alliance which may supersede Tusc.
We would then be an open public faction of a new mass party, as we were as Militant in Labour. The CPGB, CPB, SWP, RCP and various others would all be as well. Perhaps we would find we didn’t have as much to disagree on as we do now, and some of the factions may merge or split, as new debates become relevant in these changed circumstances.
The main difference between this approach and the CPGB-PCC’s seems to be that you want to somehow start a mass communist party with open public factions from scratch and then expect people from the existing parties to all split off and join it. You think this new party needs to have a very defined programme from the start, whereas we think we need to attract masses of working class people with a programme that is more general.
We would be building this party democratically with input from a mass of workers, not dictating a programme to them. It may therefore involve some compromises in finding a way to fudge the issue of revolution vs reform, but then we as a revolutionary faction would try to win the majority over to our revolutionary positions, as would the other revolutionary factions, including yourselves.
You seem to think this strategy is doomed, because of the history of prior ‘broad left’ projects. Yet how is your strategy any less doomed? If you set up another party with an overly specific programme, how are you not just another ‘sect’? Just because you may have public factions - ie, more than one part of your organisation issuing a newspaper with a tiny circulation?
Frankly, your critique of the general approach of SPEW is very underdeveloped, compared with your critique of the SWP, about whom we generally share your feelings. You tend to lump us in with them under the category of ‘sects’ without making clear your precise differences with SPEW, and why you are not seeking a ‘fusion’ process with us, as you are with Prometheus, etc, nor actively helping to build Tusc into an alliance of all the Marxists in the UK.
I would be interested to read a longer article in your pages addressing your specific issues with Tusc and SPEW, justifying your attitude towards (or against) active cooperation with us.
Joseph O’Connor Meldau
Bristol
Two parties
My article, which I headed ‘Two parties’, was retitled ‘A very English possibilist’ and the introduction read: “Steve Freeman of the Republican Labour Education Forum dismisses the idea of a mass Communist Party as utterly utopian. Instead he proposes a Commonwealth Party” (March 6). Now I don’t have a problem with your introduction: it is your right to introduce my article as you see fit.
However, I should have the opportunity to correct any misunderstanding. I won’t take offence at being accused of being “very English” or see it as a racial slur. I am in agreement with Rishi Sunak, who rightly claimed he was very English - as against Suella Braverman, who said Sunak was British and could not be English for reasons of ethnicity. He was simply the wrong colour. Since the Communist Party of Great Britain is British, I am wondering if you agree with Braverman on this?
I keep telling Carla Roberts she is English and she point-blank refuses! I often claim that Marx (like Darwin) was one of the most important Englishmen that has ever lived. Lenin refers to Marx as “after living in Britain for decades and becoming half English” (Selected works Volume 1, p628), I am more extreme than Lenin on this matter - Marx was 100% English from the minute he settled in England!
None of this denied his right to call himself German or Jewish, if he wanted to choose his personal identity. Most English people have a number of identities: for example, English aristocracy, English working class, English Muslims or English Jews.
The main point was the claim that I had dismissed “the idea of a mass Communist Party as utterly utopian”. We cannot dismiss the idea of a mass Communist Party, because there was one in Germany in 1932 and indeed a mass Chinese Communist Party today. Of course, both of these are of the Stalinist variety. So the idea of mass communist party is not utterly utopian. It is just “utterly utopian”, given the state of the current Marxist movement in England in 2025. We need to be honest about that. The problem is left communism, with its wild talk of a mass Communist Party now. That is pure hocus-pocus. A few intellectuals are trying to hoodwink the working class with exciting promises.
If the CPGB, Talking About Socialism and a section of Prometheus merge into a single group, it will not be a mass Marxist-communist party. It won’t even have the majority of present-day Marxists. It will just be another group, to add to the long list. Instead communists need to pitch their tent in the right place. We need a new communist tendency that can challenge the fragmentation and failure of present-day Stalinism and Trotskyism.
Meanwhile there is the possibility of a mass party of the left in England. This was shown by Corbynist Labour and more recently by the mass pro-Palestine demonstrations on the streets, and showed up in the 2024 general election. Has Marxism anything useful or constructive to say about uniting this movement into a political force? There is a long list of failed left parties from the Socialist Labour Party, Socialist Alliance, Respect, Left Unity, and Tusc, down to the present. It was not ‘broadness’ that failed, but the communists, who capitulated to social monarchism for a variety of opportunistic and sectarian reasons.
Steve Freeman
email
Why ‘official’?
Why put ‘official’ in front of ‘CPGB’, as there was only the Communist Party of Great Britain before the dissolution of the USSR? It was one single party organisation that you are talking about.
You are retrospectively altering history due to the post-Soviet period settlement, when the CPGB broke up. It wasn’t broken up in the Soviet period of history. The CPGB was formed in 1920 and was dissolved in 1991. Whatever the arguments about rights to this, rights to that, regarding the post-Soviet period Communist Party of Britain, this party has - if not the fullest of rights - majority rights to track itself back in time to the CPGB.
But this is irrelevant, when it comes to the Soviet period, when only one undisputed Communist Party of Great Britain existed in legal and constitutional form. Calling that party ‘official’ is to question that iron fact of history and turn history on its head, which is especially harmful to the younger generation. ‘Truth’ is our communist motto. The CPGB existed and no amount of sarcasm or criticism or present-day dissatisfaction can alter that ineradicable fact.
This is something that has been bugging me for some time. Your audience has a mixed political background and perhaps, as things go, CPGB-PCC members only make up a small percentage of that audience. It’s the same with the Morning Star, for that matter. I am making a valid, critical point without any disrespect, though that is common with Weekly Worker writers and I think there should be adjustment.
Changing historical fact is no laughing matter. I would have thought your analysis of the Soviet Union would make your paper and party alive to that fact.
Elijah Traven
Hull