Letters

Routinism

It is with keen interest that I have been following the coverage of Ireland in the Weekly Worker. On the whole, I think that the position of the editorial team is excellent. It is clear that it is ABC of revolutionary Marxism to unconditionally defend the IRA, whatever our criticisms are of their strategy and tactics.

In Weekly Worker July 11 there was an article by Jim Blackstock (‘Another “peace” blip’) as well as a letter by Roy Bull. Although comrade Bull’s letter was wide of the mark, its frothiness was in sharp contrast to the pedestrian character of Blackstock’s article.

Blackstock’s article smacks too much of routinism and complacency. Although the general thrust of the article is correct - in general the military actions of the IRA are subordinate to the overall political strategy of imperialist ‘peace’ negotiations - this is clearly not the full story. Roy Bull’s letter is the flip side of the usual economistic wishful thinking of the likes of Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party. They portray reality as they wish it to be: if only the catholic and protestant workers were concerned with roads, privatisation and ‘cuts’. Roy’s wishful thinking and stageism leads him to believe that the reality is that the IRA is on the verge of victory.

I would expect this idealism from someone whose political position calls on British imperialism to dismantle its sectarian statelet. I stand for the unconditional right of the Irish to self-determination - this includes dismantling imperialist structures as they see fit, not calling on the British ruling class to ‘clean up its mess’. I think that the Irish have had about 800 years too much such ‘assistance’ from British and English rulers. But it disturbs me that a Weekly Worker journalist would end his article with such fatalism as was in Blackstock’s article. He concluded: “Like the London and Manchester bombs, the stand-off at Drumcree is another blip on the road towards the imperialist-imposed ‘peace’ settlement.”

In general terms this conclusion is not wrong per se, it just ignores the instability that is inherent in the ‘peace’ process. It ignores that the working class is the motor force of history. The Drumcree stand-off and subsequent accommodation of the Orange Order by the imperialist forces has led to seething anger in the republican community. People are suggesting that the level of feeling is similar to the early 70s; there is brewing tension around the imminent Apprentice Boys march. This is history unfolding - certainly under the general rubric of an imperialist resolution of ‘hot-spots’ - but rather than simply describing what is unfolding, almost in Morning Star fashion, our communist journalism should be consciously intervening. Of course, we do not have much impact on the outcome of the Irish struggle at this point, but we should also not take an abstentionist position.

John Craig’s article the following week (Weekly Worker July 18) also contains some of the pedestrian descriptive character of Blackstock’s article. However, his concluding paragraph is much more open-ended. He writes: “The events of the last week indicate a still volatile situation which has not yet been resolved. In such a climate the political landscape can change very rapidly.” Of course it is the conscious intervention of the working class which could resolve this situation in a positive, revolutionary and anti-imperialist manner. It is to this end we subordinate our activity as communists, including our communist journalism.

Martin Blum
London

RUC armoury

Once again we have seen the excessive use and abuse of a particular item within the British/RUC armoury - the plastic bullet. These bullets have proven so many times what damage, hurt and scars, mentally as well as physically, they can leave in their wake

The RUC have full knowledge on what the plastic bullet is capable of inflicting, but refuse to recognise this. They continue time after time to use these ferocious bullets mostly on the nationalist community. The RUC and their bullets are well past their sell-by date. So it can only be in the interests of everyone within our communities that these are decom-missioned now.

Any credibility or acceptability the RUC had remaining before Garvaghy, Belfast, Derry and in incidents in other nationalist areas have long gone. As they have shown yet again, they can never be an impartial police force, as their make-up has determined that from its outset.

Republican Socialist prisoner of war
Long Kesh

Pained fog

Eddie Ford’s distortions (Weekly Worker July 18) solve none of the problems of his first ‘peace’ bomb article (Weekly Worker June 20). Just when did the IRA/Sinn Fein become another ‘victim’ of US pacification? How? What happened? Instead he adds a new problem. Just when did the IRA/Sinn Fein decide that their aim was no longer the defeat of British imperialism but only “to get the most they can”, thereby changing the nature of their armed struggle, according to Ford? Who announced it? Where and when? Both alternatives are just Ford fantasies.

My letter clearly explained that it was the republican movement which had put “unprecedented international pressure on imperialism”, so why ask “who by?”, slanting the quote to try to make it imply something else entirely. The lobbying, fund-raising and propaganda tours around the hugely influential Irish American vote in the USA are well known. Bombing campaigns against British interests across Europe have been equally influential on world opinion. Why doubt this? Only so that you can stand up your defeatist thesis that IRA/Sinn Fein has been “isolated”.

Why do you need these distortions? Because of a sectarian petty bourgeois mentality whose shallowness finds contradiction uncomfortable. Trotskyism was identical, formally ‘supporting’ the Soviet workers’ state but in reality tail-ending every filthy anti-communist slander to try to add to the damage Stalinism was already inflicting. On Ireland, Healy formally adhered to ‘unconditional acceptance of the IRA’s right to fight any way it chooses’, but whenever a nasty bomb went off, the little rat dived for cover, joining in big-bourgeois denunciation of ‘IRA evil’, just like the disgraceful opportunism you chose to publish from McCann and Douglass.

You remain baffled by the simple contradictory reality that it is the anti-communist IRA/Sinn Fein which has led the successful anti-imperialist struggle against British colonial occupation, something communists should have been doing. You remove this pained fog from your undialectical thinking by simply fictionalising an IRA/Sinn Fein ‘defeat’. Pure subjectivism.

Generations of Trotskyists did the same to the Soviet workers’ state, deriding its ‘socialism’ more venomously than even the big bourgeois, because the contradiction of sordid Stalinism running the most enlightened social achievements and world role in the whole history of civilisation was too difficult for their straight-line thinking brains to cope with. If a couple of things were rotten, then everything had to be rotten.

Ford suffers this more than most. Quotes from Trotsky exposing his treacherous attempts to demoralise the USSR and the international working class are dimly assumed to mean an old fashioned CPGB worship of JV Stalin. To call such dull thinking undialectical is to put it very mildly.

You should abandon these utterly irrelevant as well as childish and disgraceful slanders.

The CPGB ‘reply’ then simply invents things the Economic and Philosophical Science Review (ESPR) has never stated, in order to knock down so many Aunt Sallies, specifically, mainly that the ESPR positions represent “so much praise upon the Stalinite bureaucracy”; or “there is always JV Stalin who can save us all the time and effort and build ‘communism’ for us”; or “why do we need a communist party at all with all these ‘surrogates’ and ‘substitutes’ floating around - Red Army, JV Stalin, ANC, Gerry Adams, etc”; or “uncritical cheerleaders for IRA/Sinn Fein”; or “the national-liberation struggle is the preserve of nationalist movements”; or “communists can emerge like supermen after the national liberation stage”; or “pro-IRA internationalism is flowering inside the British working class”; and much more such gibberish, not one word of which was uttered by the letter to the CPGB (Weekly Worker July 11). Just who “has taken leave of his senses” (to quote some more CPGB nonsense)?

To identify Trotskyist defeatism as a fake ‘revolutionary’ petty bourgeois mentality fantasising only about the ‘perfect revolution’ implies no support for Stalinist revisionism at all, which is where the CPGB began life, not the EPSR. To see the IRA/Sinn Fein national liberation struggle as a defeat for British imperialism does not remotely imply an uncritical approach to the laughable ideological limitations of petty bourgeois nationalism, or that national liberation struggles must be the preserve of nationalist movements (Cuba, Vietnam and China to some extent, are obvious proof of the opposite, communist leadership). It would have been better if there had been communists around to lead the Irish national liberation struggle. To see that British imperialist setbacks are the route for British workers to break from a pro-imperialist position is not remotely the same as saying that “pro-IRA internationalism is flowering inside the British working class”. Another falsification.

The CPGB is just lying and distorting to make its ‘reply’, and still failing to explain how the defeat of apartheid was a ‘setback’. The overthrow of reaction by revolutionary struggle cannot always proceed directly to the total victory of the socialist revolution, as Vietnam showed, after the French defeat, via a negotiated outcome - especially when the ANC and SACP leadership is non-communist or even anti-communist. But to see the overthrow of apartheid as a victory for imperialist reaction is just perverse silliness, lacking the slightest grasp of historical development. Ditto in Ireland. The CPGB suffer from Trotskyist sectarianism of the most blinkered self-aggrandising style.

Roy Bull
Manchester

More fog

It’s a long, hard road, but progress is clearly being made towards principled unity of communists. Final success can only come if all of us are genuinely involved in the process of understanding what each of us is saying. Language which is gobbledegook to most of us cannot be tolerated.

An extreme example of such language is that which is used by Phil Sharpe. Weekly Worker and Open Polemic (in which Phil has also written) should refuse to accept any further contributions from him unless they are written in language which most of us can understand. Unless that happens, most of us will have no idea whether the content of the contribution has any merit, and the pages taken up by it are totally wasted. Worse, such gobbledegook will annoy, deter - even repulse - many who are giving serious thought to our problems. Let me be honest. Phil Sharpe’s printed displays of language are so obscure that one wonders if he is taking the mickey out of the rest of us and is trying to see how far he can push even meaningless waffle.

I know I will be accused of displaying ‘typical’ British distrust or even disdain of theory, of ‘cleverness’, but that is not true and I submit the following quote, which to me proves my case:

“The philosophical tension between his [Adorno’s] brilliant epistemological emphasis upon non-identity for understanding the relationship between subject and object is combined with an ontology of oppressive identity, which precludes the possibility of oppositional non-identity. This means Adorno accommodates to Schelling’s view that the reconstruction of a nostalgic cultural aesthetic is the only sphere of emancipatory and philosophical creativity.”

(And so say all of us!)

If this has any useful bearing on our efforts towards a ‘common theoretical programme for communists’, can Phil Sharpe re-write it please so that most of us can at least understand what points he is making? Fortunately, I find the language used in most articles in the Weekly Worker to be easy to read and understand.

Peter Jordan
Bristol

Post-capitalism

Even capitalists say we need a change. Conservatives are calling for a republic. We at last are seeing the breakdown of capitalism in this country. Yet Tony Blair seeks to impose a form of national socialism - which has nothing to do with true socialist and communist principles. I urge all voters to think and say, ‘If it is not what we want, then we won’t vote for it’ - and say it loud!

Paul Kay
Herts