Letters

Sad state SWP

Comrade Carla Roberts provides yet another useful update to the electoral trials and tribulations of the Socialist Workers Party’s central committee in her latest article, ‘What’s the point ?’ (April 24). I do get the feeling that comrade Roberts follows all this and reports back to us as an example of the maxim, ‘I do this so you don’t have to’. For this we should all be grateful.

The article focuses in the March 29 We Demand Change (WDC) rally in east London. The entire event has been uploaded onto YouTube under the video title, ‘We Demand Change’, on a dedicated WDC channel and also on the ‘Project for Peace and Justice’ Channel by Jeremy Corbyn’s YouTube site. It is an over seven-hour marathon watch, but the interesting part starts at around four hours 44 minutes, when there is a debate on an electoral road forward and a possible party formation. The panel consisted of some big hitters like Andrew Feinstein, Zoe Garbett of the Greens and Richard Boyd Barrett TD - the latter being of the SWP’s Irish sister party and a member of the prestigious Irish acting dynasty, the Cusack family. He is also the owner of a perpetually smug facial expression, whose dream of a ministerial Mercedes, courtesy of Sinn Féin, seems to be fading sadly.

Anyway, this was very much a controlled SWP show. The sectarian kicking the Greens got was pretty bad. I almost felt sorry for Ms Garbett. It seems that after ignoring elections for 17 years (since the collapse of Respect) the SWP central committee is now all in for elections. Comrade Feinstein seemed to follow Jeremy Corbyn’s general thinking and Jeremy Corbyn is a skilled hand at keeping the SWP at arm’s length - saying a lot, but meaning very little, while throwing the SWP the occasional bone. We all know that Jeremy would go back into Labour tomorrow if he could.

The contributions from the floor began with a few Green Party members, but these were quickly shut down by the obedient chair (complete with a red flag to wave). The Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century comrade made a good contribution (5:40:20). Also a black male comrade did too. The rest were mainly bellicose SWP hacks unfortunately. They displayed the sort of ‘pre-comrade Delta’ hubris, while conforming to the worst ‘Dave/Davina Spart’ stereotypes - basically shouting and screaming about the Green Party, while saying bizarrely that unity with them was somehow needed. This performative nonsense is just no good for electoral appeals to the working class. They will dismiss it instantly.

Comrade Roberts mentioned Lewis Nielsen , the SWP national secretary. He was seen in the background prowling behind the panel, smartphone in hand - an intense young man, who rarely describes himself in interviews as an SWP senior member, but as a “Stand Up to Racism officer”. No doubt this is the organisation that pays his full-timer wages, courtesy of the NEU union. No doubt the reason that SUtR allows racist Zionists on its demonstrations is to keep the union funders sweet and the money supply rolling in - comrade Nielsen gives the air of a ‘professional revolutionary’ who is yet to work in a real job. Quite how one can be a professional revolutionary in a society with zero revolutionary consciousness is beyond me. Maybe Richard Seymour was correct when he said, “We are all Reformists now!”

Well, to go back to the Weekly Worker article title, ‘What’s the point?’. Not much, it seems. No-one worthwhile will unite with the SWP in a new party lash-up and it is left to them to run ‘independent’ candidates who will hopefully save their deposits, so they can somehow ‘prove’ to the left that an electoral initiative is worthwhile.

A rather sad state of affairs for the party of Cliff, Hallas, Foot and Harman.

Paul O’Keeffe
email

Irrelevant unity

I have cancelled my subscription to the Weekly Worker, because both the paper and the political group which you represent, the Communist Party of Great Britain, seem to have lost all sense of direction and perspective.

I have been associated, however loosely, with the Weekly Worker for over 20 years since the dissolution of the Socialist Alliance, both as a contributor to the paper and, during the Corbyn era, working with your members in Labour Against the Witchhunt.

We live, as Graham Bash recently reminded us, in an “age of monsters”. In his Prison notebooks Gramsci spoke of how in the interregnum “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Yet what we are facing is not a brave new world, which is what the defeat of fascism represented, but a new dystopia represented by the genocide in Gaza - a “post-apocalyptic killing zone”, in the words of Philippe Lazzarini.

Perhaps the best representative of this dystopia is Donald Trump, the deadly clown and convicted felon, whose saving grace is that he doesn’t even pretend to have any morality, commitment to democracy or civilisation, as he presides over a system that kidnaps students and migrants off the streets in order to deport them to far-off jurisdictions, bypassing the first amendment entirely.

Imperialism and Zionism are joined at the hip, as ‘anti-Semitism’ is employed in order to justify any war crime and any atrocity. In the USA, Britain and western Europe there is an ongoing war on the Palestine solidarity movement, abetted by complicit university administrations, such as at Columbia. In Britain a whole series of activists and dissident journalists, including myself, have suffered raids and arrests by the ‘anti-terrorist’ police. In Germany, Berlin is a veritable police state for Palestine solidarity.

In Britain the Labour Party is indistinguishable from the opposition, as it ramps up military expenditure, whilst continuing to arm and support the Israeli state. At the same time it is attacking claimants, the disabled and refugees, as it defers to the wishes of capital. We are also faced with the growth of a mass far-right party. Regardless of whether Reform wins the May 1 by-election in Runcorn, it is establishing itself as a major political contender in Britain.

Yet what is the CPGB’s political priority? Forging unity between itself and two or three micro-political sects in the belief that it can create a new Marxist party! This is the political equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, as it is sinking. The Weekly Worker and the CPGB have next to nothing to say about building a left that can begin to address the political situation as it is. Instead its main priority is in building another left sect.

Last July we saw the coming together of some forces on the left, when Jeremy Corbyn won his seat, as did five independents. Not all of them, of course, were necessarily on the left, but the defeat of Jonathan Ashworth was particularly welcome. Others such as Jess Philips and Wes Streeting narrowly avoided defeat. One might expect in this situation for the CPGB to have something to say about building a left that can challenge Starmer, Zionism and imperialism and the attack on democratic rights, to say nothing of Labour’s neoliberal agenda.

One thing is very clear. We are not in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary era. Working class struggle is at an all-time low. The major trade unions are controlled by the right, yet the CPGB maintains radio silence on all of this and pretends that all we have to do is emulate the Bolsheviks in the entirely different situation of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hence your fascination with dead Bolsheviks.

Little things like the atomisation of the working class and Britain’s de-industrialisation make no difference to your analysis. Yet without a working class capable of acting as the ‘grave diggers of capitalism’ there can be no socialism. It would seem self-evident that there is a need for a mass party of the left that is capable of resisting the growth of a mass racist party and a Labour Party that is indistinguishable politically from the Conservatives. We also face a growing climate crisis, which throws into question the very survival of the planet.

Yet, instead of engaging with these questions, the Weekly Worker and CPGB have turned their backs on the living political struggle in favour of an irrelevant unity project. The idea that revolutionaries, Marxists and reformists should unite in one mass party is rejected out of hand in favour of an unrealisable sectarian project.

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Backward ideas

My niece is now a Reform voter. She is worried that a council-sponsored housing development next to her home will be used to house asylum-seekers who’ve crossed the Channel in small boats. She told me that, if these new homes are “filled with Muslims and Pakis”, she will move.

Hopefully, as Marx pointed out, the whip of counterrevolution will lead to an advance of revolutionary forces. Perhaps the victory of Reform in the Runcorn by-election, the mayoral contests, and the winning of hundreds of seats in the county council elections will act as a spur for the left to get its act together and form the embryo of a mass Communist Party.

I therefore wish every success to the Communist unity discussions between the CPGB, RS21, Prometheus and Talking About Socialism. Perhaps, now that Peter Taaffe has passed away, the members of the Socialist Party in England and Wales will see sense, and stop flogging the dead horse of a Labour Party mark two, and join in with the Communist unity discussions.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Ignorant trope

Amy Wilhelm’s letter (April 24) contains one point which is valid. I said (and wrote) “trans activists”, when I should have said (and written) “the politically dominant tendency among trans activists”. It was incorrect on my part to flatten views in this way.

Nonetheless, I stand by my political characterisation of the politically dominant tendency among trans activists. In essence, this rested on the idea that the specific oppression of trans people could be addressed by accepting the state’s insistence on rigid gender binarism, but demanding state-recognised ‘gender recognition’: a policy analogous to the struggle for gay marriage. But, unlike gay marriage, this demand required a demand for speech policing. And the result was to create what military writers call an indefensible salient - which has duly collapsed under attack, with worse consequences for trans people than if it had not been created in the first place.

Otherwise, comrade Wilhem’s letter is largely unproductive. At several points she denounces my “ignorance”. This is merely a standard rhetorical trope used by the gatekeepers of the popular-frontist and academic left - whether Eurocommunist, Foucaultian, intersectionalist, ‘anti-class-reductionist’ or whatever. The trope denies implicitly that there could possibly be reasoned disagreement with their orthodoxy: this must instead be accounted for by “ignorance”. I am only too familiar with both the trope and the ‘anti-class-reductionist’ arguments it protects: I have opposed them since the 1980s, albeit in different contexts.

Taking the other points in order, my reference to the idea that the UK Supreme Court’s ruling requires post-operative trans women to use men’s toilets, etc is not intended to argue that only people who have had surgery matter. It is merely to point out that the UKSC’s ruling is unreasonable on its own terms and that the Communist Party of Britain and Young Communist League’s support for it is also unreasonable on their own terms.

Comrade Wilhelm says that “‘transphobic’ is used - by analogy to ‘homophobic’, as a broad term meaning ‘anti-trans’.” I am perfectly aware of the point, but have argued explicitly against this usage (also in relation to ‘homophobic’), on the ground that it carries deeply undesirable political baggage (see ‘Clearing the ground’ Weekly Worker February 9 2023). It is both misleading on the explanation of Republican and Tory political operatives’ cynical entering-wedge attacks on trans people, and by psychologising the issues, pre-emptive of disagreement.

Comrade Wilhelm’s assertion that “‘Trans women are women’ is the alternative, solidaristic politics that Mike so longs for” is question-begging. The slogan only makes sense in the context of leaving the compulsory gender binary intact, but demanding special state recognition (the point I made above). In this context, it is immediately un-solidaristic with other groups who are also oppressed by the compulsory gender binary, but who would not benefit from ‘recognition’ in a destination gender.

So claiming it is solidaristic requires the meaning of ‘solidarity’ used by intersectionalists: that is, that nothing is ‘solidarity’ unless it accepts the self-identified demands of ‘the oppressed’ (as defined without reference to class and to other oppressed groups). I have argued at length against this approach to what counts as solidarity: see my 2018 series in this paper (June 7, 21, 28 and July 5) or ‘Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?’ Critique vol 46, pp541-58.

Finally, I made the point that trans women have medical needs that are distinct from cis women, and trans men medical needs distinct from cis men. I gave the example of risks of breast cancer and of prostate cancer. In a previous article (‘Tailism cannot deliver’ Weekly Worker March 9 2023), I cited some relevant sources for both these points. Obviously, the fact that trans women who are taking hormone treatment have a radically raised risk of breast cancer relative to cis men is a good ground for them to be screened (comrade Wilhem’s reference). But it does not raise the risk as high as the one-in-eight risk affecting cis women.

Moreover, the point was merely an example. Trans people complain - rightly - of health services’ failure to provide for their specific needs. But this precisely requires that trans people are not treated, for the purposes of medical treatment, as identical to people of the destination gender.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Genuine solidarity

Amy Wilhelm’s rather laden letter effectively dismisses the concerns of women and frames comrade Macnair’s initial letter almost as a loaded hate piece. It blatantly ignores the concerns of biological women and their lived reality through purely an activist lens and instead focuses solely on trans issues.

Amy makes an immediate false equivalence by decrying the rejection of ‘Trans women are women’ as being akin to saying disabled women cannot be women ‘for some purposes’. This is boxing in biological women as a subtype of their own sex - a ridiculous hit job - and frames the rights of male-born people as immediately adjacent to and part of the misogyny experienced by women throughout our entire existence as humans, erasing the material impacts that our patriarchal society continues to have by equating the experiences of biological males and females, as if there is total equality. ‘Trans women are women’ functions as a liberal demand, based on individual self-definition rather than a collective material analysis of oppression. It’s not about abolishing oppressive structures, but about seeking validation within them, which Marxists should be sceptical of.

To claim that ‘self-ID’ has had no negative impacts again is incorrect - examples in the media include the ‘Wi Spa incident’ in August 2021, where a male paedophile identifying himself as a woman was found to have exposed himself to women and children. A Californian women’s prison has begun to provide condoms after trans prisoners were transferred there and females almost inexplicably fell pregnant shortly after. This is one example amongst numerous others. Single-sex spaces (like prisons, shelters and sports) exist because of historical and continuing male violence and female vulnerability. Undermining the legal category of ‘woman’ could risk making protections for biological women unenforceable.

Trans people without a doubt face their own struggles and oppression, but the slogan, ‘Trans women are women’, is divisive and the Supreme Court ruling did not attempt to legislate this phraseology: it merely clarified existing guidelines as they were originally intended. Trusting capitalist institutions (like the healthcare industry, courts and governments) to define categories of oppression (via ‘gender identity’ laws) puts the working class at the mercy of liberal elites, not in control of its own struggle for liberation.

Prioritising identity politics is inherently incompatible with the Marxist principle of class-consciousness. Identity politics elevates individual identities over the collective interests of the proletariat, distracting from the fundamental struggle against class oppression. Likewise, the promotion of ‘gender-affirming healthcare’ serves to reinforce and fuel the capitalist healthcare system that Marxists fundamentally oppose. Marxism is grounded in material reality - including the biological reproduction of the species, which is a foundation for the family unit (which in turn is a foundation of class society). Ignoring biological sex undermines Marxist analysis of how women’s oppression is historically rooted in their role in social reproduction.

The rights of women and trans people are both incredibly important and both have a home in the proletarian struggle, but to align both as a single cause is problematic and erases the continuing struggles of women in the face of patriarchy. True solidarity is not about erasing differences, but about recognising them and organising collectively. Denying the material reality of sex undermines women’s ability to organise around their specific oppression. Recognising biological sex is not an attack on trans people, but a necessary foundation for building genuine solidarity across all oppressed groups.

ACS
Manchester

Sex changing

In response to Amy Wilhelm’s letter, let me say that we need to recognise there’s a whole new vocabulary to get acquainted with - and even a whole new way of thinking about our bodies and how we respond to people who have concepts about body and gender identification that for most of our lives were absent from our consciousness. We need to be tolerant during this learning curve, especially in regard to the older members of society who haven’t been brought up in a world where these terms were being used and the concepts have been without prominence.

It’s a bit like the terminology surrounding leftwing politics. I’ve been in the fringe politics movement all my adult life and I am still perplexed when I hear particular phraseology, such as from an article in the Weekly Worker (‘The relevance of Lenin today’ July 12 2012). It was a reference to Rosa Luxemburg’s, foundational political document, ‘On the Spartacus programme’, and how it “offered a remarkable argument about the complex, recursive historical dialectic of progression and regression issuing from 1848”. Sigh ... But do you get the point? I’m not anti-communist, by the way, and I’m not an anti-intellectual for not understanding this type of terminology.

We must keep the floodgates of discussion open and be understanding about the complexities of this issue and many others. It’s different for people growing up in today’s world. They’ve never known a time, for example, before the smartphone, or before most of us didn’t spend the majority of our waking hours looking at a screen.

I’ll just end the letter by stating my views on transgenderism. For me, people are always born into the right bodies and we should teach children this. If these children want to express themselves in a characteristic way associated with people of the opposite sex, then they should be allowed to do this without feeling they need to change their sex, either because they’re a boy who feels like a girl, or because they’re a girl who feels like a boy. Physical transformation is for me a different issue from people wanting to express themselves via gender types.

Let any physical transformation issue at adulthood - even adults deciding these things later regret it. So why would we place these burdens on children? Take this comment from Julia Grant, a pioneering transgender activist in the UK, who said, “For many years, I felt like a woman in a man’s body. And then, after surgery, I felt like a gay man trapped in a woman’s body.” Julia was in her 20s when she first transitioned.

I hope I haven’t broken too many plates, no matter how ham-fisted I am in normal life.

Louis Shawcross
County Down

Hamas out, out …

Daniel Lazare gets quite worked up about the CPGB silence on anti-Hamas demonstrations in Gaza in his letter (April 24). Apparently he has noted “the most important political development since the war began some 18 months ago: ie, the eruption of mass anti-Hamas protests” and - blow me - the CPGB is trying to cover them up. I wonder if they go anywhere towards matching the number of Israelis who have, with immense courage, opposed the war within Israel and the ramped-up ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.

Lazare is very upset about the airbrushing of the protests out of history by Ian Spencer, but I think there are bigger targets. I’m a regular reader of The Guardian yet I’ve seen no reference there to this “eruption”. Perhaps I’ve missed a small inside article or just failed to read their online pages? But, given the general position of The Guardian on events in Gaza, I would expect it to make front-page news for several days.

I also dip in online every few days to the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News - nothing there either. Perhaps I haven’t scrolled down far enough to see their coverage of “the most important political development since the war began …” Again, I would have expected this to make front-page news.

But, I’m forgetting, Lazare is in the States, so has he seen this story on the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post? Has it been the top story on NBC and Fox News? Strange that it did not make its way to the UK with the same oomph.

By the by, have there been any other important political developments since the war began? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “political”, as opposed to repeated episodes of mass murder. The election of Donald Trump might count as “important”, and the cutting off from Gaza of aid, food, water, power, medication, etc might be “political”!

Anyway, apparently the destruction of Gaza and so many innocent men, women and children was the fault of Hamas. Was the Bund then responsible for the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943?

Indeed, Lazare implies that nobody should stand up to oppressors - they’ll only make it worse. Much better to endure and, as he says, “Like most people on earth, they want peace, work and democracy and are therefore sick and tired of a party that stands for the opposite.” Are you sure, Dan, that they’re not sick and tired of Zionism?

Jim Nelson
email

Defend Wrack

NASUWT, the teachers’ union, the sixth largest union in the TUC, is in difficulties over its appointment of Matt Wrack - former general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union and TUC president - as its general secretary.

Having announced that Wrack was elected unopposed, the union has been taken to court by one of its own staff, Neil Butler, who was blocked from seeking nominations on the grounds that he is not a member of the union. There is a clear hypocrisy here, in that the executive’s chosen candidate, Wrack, is not only not a member of the union, but also not a member of the industry he would now be representing. The union has capitulated (paying a substantial amount in costs) and branches now have until May 26 to nominate general secretary candidates. Butler, or anyone else, will need 25 nominations and meanwhile Wrack is left as acting general secretary.

There is a bit of momentum building against him, but it is worth interrogating the different places this is coming from and the politics involved. Partly the reaction is a natural response of grassroots members of “the teachers’ union” to the appointment of someone who is very clearly not a teacher. Following the 2017 amalgamation of their rivals - the National Union of Teachers and Association of Teachers and Lecturers - to form the National Education Union, NASUWT reacted by rebranding themselves “the teachers’ union” (laughably instructing every speaker of theirs at TUC events to begin every speech with ‘Joe Bloggs, NASUWT, the teachers’ union’) as an attempt to counter the industrial unionist approach of the NEU.

NASUWT members understandably vented anger on social media at the idea that a former firefighter should be appointed general secretary without an election. Some other attacks were predictable and, despite their origin, quite on the nose. Paul Embery, embittered former comrade of Wrack, took great joy in quoting Wrack himself from 2017:

“I hear people who are described as officials of unions. To me an official of a union is someone who’s been elected by workers to represent them, not someone who’s got a job as a researcher or policy or whatever. In my union, all our officials, the people we call officials, are elected; we employ members of staff, and I have a great deal of respect for them, but we wouldn’t call them officials of the union. That’s one of our strengths - everyone has come through the industry, everyone has been a firefighter, or worked in the fire service” (emphasis added).

It is hard to say there is no hypocrisy involved here from comrade Wrack, and even harder to defend the undemocratic process by which he was initially appointed. However, I have yet to see an NASUWT member raise the issue the mainstream media is most concerned about. The Guardian kicked off the smears on April 12, and was swiftly followed by the likes of the Jewish Chronicle and the Daily Mail. The issue? Summed up by The Guardian as “Jewish leaders say Wrack downplayed reports of anti-Semitism within Labour” as “the so-called furore about so-called anti-Semitism”, framing it as “an attempt to undermine Corbyn as leader”. Surely in 2025 the only qualification to recognise that the anti-Semitism ‘scandal’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party was an attempt to undermine the leader would be to be resident on planet Earth, so undeniable is it.

Ultimately members should run trade unions, not appointed leaders, no matter how good their politics - but certainly not Tory MPs or the courts. Communists should defend Matt Wrack against these ruling class smears, and recognise that the demonstrable fear of teacher union unity (on industrial and political issues) is a positive reflection of the influence this section of the class has on the wider struggle. We should also fight for democracy in our unions and unity between them.

Sean Carter
London