Letters

Broad frontism

Last weekend I had the opportunity of attending RS21’s annual event, ‘Festival of the Oppressed’; as one of the better extant organisations within the British left, and one thankfully featuring a higher proportion of younger supporters, I don’t think it should be too controversial to say that the general level of political consciousness and strategic understanding present within members of RS21 is in line with the general level of political consciousness and strategic understanding present within prominent segments of the wider British left.

On the positive side, I do believe that the efforts of the Marxist Unity Caucus and people with ‘partyist’ inclinations within RS21 to spread their political viewpoints and polemicise with members, new or otherwise, represents a positive streak, and that their future growth, or even outgrowth, within and near RS21 would indicate a favourable outlook for comrades who believe that these ideas can be popular and can convince people who otherwise hold misguided beliefs.

Negatively, however, RS21 itself is still an organisation superfluously heterogeneous both in its purported politics and internal organisation of members and actions. Eg, from the talks I went to, it was abjectly clear that, while a general theme was aimed at by the organisers, the talks themselves were often confused, relatively aimless and not clear in direction. Of course, my criticism of one event can be viewed as obstinate, but it points to a wider problem of RS21 - while it is not bureaucratic, in that it does not lend itself to the ‘culty’ bureaucratism of other left sects, it is bureaucratic akin to the broad frontism of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, People Before Profit, etc, and that the eventual fulfilment of mass communist politics requires eventually abandoning all that as an organisational formula.

Baris Graham
email

Embargo

Harlow Labour MP Chris Vince remains silent on the massacres taking place in the Gaza Strip, and now the government he supports is attempting to silence people protesting against those massacres.

It has been announced that the government will proscribe Palestine Action - a direct-action group that sprayed red paint on two Royal Air Force aircraft in protest at British military assistance to the Israel Defence Forces. The proposed ban would mean that people could be imprisoned simply for expressing approval of an organisation that protests against the genocide in the Gaza Strip, while Raytheon UK (based in Harlow) and other British companies profit from supplying the state of Israel with the means to commit that genocide. Perhaps some people would not feel the need to spray paint on warplanes if MPs such as Chris Vince did not refuse to answer letters from their constituents about the horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip.

Direct action is laudable, and plays an important role, but industrial action could make a decisive difference. Workers in Britain and around the world should follow the example of the dockers in Marseilles and in Genoa, who recently refused to handle a ship with military supplies for Israel. We should be working in our unions to pass motions calling on workers to impose a total economic embargo on the state of Israel. There should be no tourism, trade or business links with it until the blockade of the Gaza Strip is lifted and the ceasefire re-established.

John Wake
Harlow

Ditch Labour

I am writing to you as a volunteer who has dedicated my own time to raise urgent concerns regarding the current trajectory of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer. I am reaching out to multiple socialist organisations across the UK and internationally to share these reflections and to urge unity and collaboration in confronting the dangerous direction our movement faces.

Recently Starmer issued a statement endorsing the US strike on Iran. This endorsement of aggressive military action signals a disturbing alignment of the UK government with US imperialism, escalating tensions in the Middle East and directly threatening the safety of people in the UK, Europe and beyond. The UK’s siding with America drags us closer towards a war that is not ours to fight, endangering working class communities and undermining international peace.

While much public attention has focused on Labour’s domestic policy shifts, international socialist organisations such as the Party of European Socialists, the Progressive Alliance and the Socialist International have issued clear statements advocating peace and justice in Palestine and the wider Middle East. Yet under Starmer’s leadership, the Labour government maintains close ties with intelligence-sharing and military cooperation with Israel, contradicting these international commitments. Palestine Action’s powerful statement, posted as a quote tweet directly to Keir Starmer on Twitter, reads: “It is your responsibility to not be a war criminal. It is your responsibility to not play an active military role in genocide. Now, it is our responsibility to do everything in our power to stop what you have allowed.”

This captures the urgent need for accountability, while Palestine Action’s courageous direct actions targeting companies complicit in Israeli military production and disrupting military operations linked to Gaza demonstrate the seriousness of resisting Labour’s complicity in imperialist wars.

In light of these issues, I believe we must put sustained pressure on international socialist organisations such as the Party of European Socialists, the Progressive Alliance and the Socialist International to take a firmer stance by cutting ties, defunding any entities complicit in these injustices and ultimately banning the Labour Party from affiliation and observer status within these bodies due to its current direction. This also extends to Labour Party-affiliated trade unions, which must sever connections and withdraw financial support. Furthermore, there is a pressing need to encourage Labour MPs, councillors and mayors to resign en masse from their Labour whip and party membership in protest against the party’s betrayal of socialist principles and its complicity in military cooperation with Israel.

I am also appalled by other issues, including the ongoing disability benefit reforms, which further highlight the party’s departure from its foundational values of justice and equality. Many disabled people are deeply worried about these changes, as the proposed cuts to personal independence payments and universal credit health elements threaten to push vulnerable individuals into greater hardship. Despite some Labour MPs opposing these cuts, the government’s plans continue to cause significant anxiety within the disabled community.

Additionally, we must promote a boycott of US products, goods and companies operating here in the UK. By refusing to purchase from these corporations, we can reduce the flow of funds that indirectly reach the US treasury and finance ongoing wars in the Middle East, including those supporting Israel’s military actions.

Since the Iraq war in the 2000s, we have witnessed a profound shift in the Labour Party’s politics. With the return of a Labour government under Starmer - who represents a ‘red Tory’ approach rather than the socialist vision championed by Jeremy Corbyn - we face the urgent need for socialist organisations to unite and collaborate in opposing this betrayal. Only through collective pressure and solidarity can we challenge Labour’s international affiliations and domestic policies that betray working class interests.

This is a critical moment for socialist organisations to reaffirm our commitment to peace, justice and international solidarity. The Labour Party’s current trajectory betrays these principles and risks enabling imperialist wars that devastate working class people globally.

John Price
email

Fantasy lunch

Who wrote the heading for Eddie Ford’s article on the change in Communist Party of Britain’s position towards the Labour Party (‘Game, set and match’, June 19)? It appears to be out of sync with the full body of the article, which seemed to me to be conducting a change in the Weekly Worker/CPGB position to a more ameliorative, diplomatic engagement with the CPB.

Has there in fact been a behind-the-scenes, under-the-counter alteration of how WW/CPGB views the CPB and what does this indicate about the everlasting, dismal situation for the socialist movement in Britain? It does show a double standard at work. Why not come out in the open and tell us if you’re returning to your first love - the real CPGB and its dutiful son, the CPB.

I suspect the work of secret ambassador Andrew Northall is at play here. Be careful you don’t become the lunch on the table. With Robert Griffiths mooted to be retiring as general secretary, there is a palpable sense of change in the air - a new young guard in the offing. Diplomacy does have its attractions and benefits.

Elijah Traven
Hull

SPGB reforms

On their website, Talking About Socialism quote Jack Conrad as saying, regarding a programme TAS is drawing up: “My fear is that what they’ll produce is something at least along the lines of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This is a maximalist programme that rejects all notions of reform, all notions of transition between capitalism with capitalist state power and communism.”

It is not clear what “rejects all notions of reform” means. If it means that the SPGB is opposed to reforms, it is wrong. The SPGB position is that a socialist party should not itself advocate reforms (as measures to be taken by the state) - this on the grounds that having a reform programme will attract non-socialist support that will eventually lead to the party giving priority to trying to get these rather than socialism. The SPGB does not regard better wages and working conditions obtained from employers by workers’ action as ‘reforms’; this is part of the class struggle in which SPGB members, as workers themselves, participate and urge others to.

The SPGB is not against reforms that do improve things, even if only temporarily, for workers. In fact the SPGB is even prepared to countenance a minority of socialist MPs voting for some if it is considered that they would benefit the working class or the socialist movement. It is simply that as a party it doesn’t advocate them or seek support on the basis of advocating them. What the SPGB is against is reformism as the strategy of pursuing reforms - either as a means of gradually improving working class conditions under capitalism or of supposedly raising working class consciousness (but actually encouraging reformist illusions). A socialist party doesn’t need a programme as “immediate demands” to be realised under capitalism.

There is also the point that, faced with a growing socialist movement, the ruling class can be expected to offer all sorts of concessions (reforms) in a bid to try to stop it growing further. So, if it’s reforms that you want, a good way to get them would be the build up of a strong socialist movement.

With regard to rejecting “all notions of transition”, the SPGB position is that, once there is a majority of workers who are determined to establish socialism (a precondition for its establishment), capitalist ownership of the means of production can be abolished - and socialism (as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production established, aka communism) - fairly rapidly after that majority has won control of political power and democratised it. There need be no period of working class administration of capitalism.

As for the owners of curry houses and fish and chip shops, once socialism is established, these won’t become state property (as Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair assume), but wouldn’t be owned by anyone. If those currently running these outlets wanted to continue doing this, they would be doing so as a free public service, not to sell a commodity, and would be entitled to access what they need on the same non-paying basis as everybody else. They wouldn’t be part of some class of petty owners surviving into socialist society.

Adam Buick
SPGB

MacIntyre claims

Dr Christopher Kaczor (Letters, June 19) challenges my claim that Alasdair MacIntyre “routinely ridiculed the church’s inability to see any political issue as pertinent except the legality of abortion” (‘Philosophy in the ordinary world’, June 5), and also asks for evidence that MacIntyre supported the legal prohibition of abortion.

To take the second point first, I refer Dr Kaczor to a lecture of MacIntyre’s at Notre Dame in 2012, called ‘Catholic instead of what?’ “To whom do we owe justice?” MacIntyre asks. “Catholics rightly affirm that we owe it to the unborn child, asserting the identity of that child with the child after birth.” I take this to be strong evidence that he approved the prohibitionist agitation of the Catholic church, given that this was a lecture delivered to American Catholics, at least in part on the matter of their political duties.

His comments on the Irish referendum in two other lectures (“Absences in Aquinas, silences in Ireland” and, in passing, “Human dignity: a puzzling and possibly dangerous idea?”) carry the strong implication that the Irish chose wrongly. If he did not in fact approve that position, then he would here have been guilty of far sneakier equivocations than anything Charles Kingsley ever accused John Henry Newman of. Thus I find these comments to be dispositive.

Kaczor’s other objection is on firmer ground. The claim, as written in my article, is far too broad. I should rather have said that MacIntyre was a sharp critic of pursuing anti-abortion policies outside of broader commitments to justice. Indeed, such was his point in the lectures I have already quoted: if we owe the unborn child justice, as he said in ‘Catholic instead of what?’, “we owe it to the child throughout its life … What we owe to each child in justice are the resources that will enable this child to become what she or he has it in her or him to become.” Elsewhere, he compared anti-abortion campaigns, where they are not connected to such commitments to justice, to a man who, having saved someone from drowning in a dangerous sea, simply leaves them to die on the beach. Such a person would be “morally unintelligible”.

I think this critique does fairly apply at least to the US Catholic Church hierarchy, which has repeatedly advised its flock over many electoral cycles that abortion is the “pre-eminent” issue to consider when voting, never mind that every other policy of the Republican Party - the only plausible anti-abortion ticket - is directly counterposed to the justice and human flourishing that MacIntyre was so concerned with. (Many tributes and obituaries have referred to his bafflement at being so popular among American conservatives.) That this undermines the church’s action on other contentious issues is spectacularly obvious at the moment, with the Trump administration waging war on the US church for its aid of migrants.

That is what I had in mind, at any rate, but my formulation - in a throwaway line - was sloppy and overbroad, and I am happy to be corrected.

Paul Demarty
Plymouth

Well is dry

Kabul’s water crisis: an inflection point for action is a report published in April 2025 by ‘Mercy Corps’ - a global non-governmental humanitarian aid organisation. The report claims that the Afghanistan capital faces a “multi-faceted water crisis”, which poses an “existential threat” to Kabul’s population of roughly six million.

The report identifies both historic and contemporary factors arising from Kabul’s geographical location, the area’s failing infrastructure, some geo-political factors - mainly involving aid and governmental oversight - and, of course, climate change. What the report fails to do is question the very economic and political system which created and exacerbates the crisis and can provide no long-term solutions.

Kabul is situated in an arid valley at the base of the Hindu Kush mountains. Having no major inland body of water nearby, it relies predominantly on groundwater which collects in natural aquifers, supplied by the melted snow and ice from the mountains. These aquifers - with a combined potential volume of more than five billion cubic metres (more than enough to supply the growing population of Kabul) - in turn supply the man-made, predominantly community borewells.

Surface water, such as that stored in reservoirs, and precipitation play a relatively minor role in Kabul’s water supply. But Kabul’s aquifer levels have dropped by up to 30 metres in the last decade - water extraction exceeds natural recharge by 44 million cubic metres each year. Nearly half of Kabul’s borewells - the residents’ main source of water - are already dried out, and those which remain are draining the aquifers at nearly double the rate at which they can be naturally replenished. Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund, therefore predicts that Kabul’s aquifers could completely dry up by as early as 2030.

The consequences are barely imaginable - mass migration, riots, further regional instability, disease, death and Mad Max levels of chaos and horror. Already by 2008, 40% of respondents to an Oxfam study cited water issues as the cause of tribal and community conflict.

Under decades of US imperialist intervention, Afghanistan’s economy and infrastructure were subordinated to external geopolitical interests to the detriment of the domestic population. To a large extent, the USA used the country as a proxy in its continuation of the cold war against the Soviet Union. This meant that development and maintenance of community resources - such as water infrastructure - were neglected.

In addition to growing shortages of water, as much as 80% of Kabul’s groundwater is contaminated with sewage, toxins and chemicals, which increase the risk of disease - especially among children and the elderly. This lack of available clean drinking water has forced the closure of schools and healthcare facilities. For those without access to well water, the price of purchasing water has risen astronomically, placing additional economic pressures on an already struggling population. Some private water companies have begun extracting large amounts of ‘public’ groundwater from their own private wells and selling it back to Kabul’s residents at vastly inflated prices.

Only about 20% of Kabul households are connected to piped running water from centralised sources and even they experience service that is sporadic at best. A majority of residents are therefore massively undersupplied with water, averaging about 20 litres per capita per day, compared to a recommended minimum level of 80 litres.

Access to regular, sufficient and clean water in Kabul is a privilege that follows class boundaries. Access to private boreholes, water tankers or imported water infrastructure comes at an ever-increasing cost, commodifying this basic human need. The working class, urban and suburban poor and modern peasantry - already alienated from the means of production - are increasingly alienated from natural resources like water too.

There have been a number of proposed water infrastructure projects, including the Panjshir River Pipeline and the Shah Toot Dam. Such projects, whilst not replacing the primary importance of natural aquifers, would significantly increase the role that surface water infrastructure plays in Kabul’s water supply, as dams and reservoirs can help to manage the flow of water supply, reducing the need for excessive groundwater extraction and alleviating pressure on the city’s vital aquifers.

Other, non-water infrastructure has also had a negative impact on the water supply. Kabul’s rapid and sprawling urbanisation - specifically the paving of much of the city’s surface area - has further decreased the ability of rainfall to naturally find its way to the aquifers - instead washing into gutters and into the Kabul River towards Pakistan.

Kabul’s water crisis to some degree reflects Afghanistan’s position in the global capitalist system: ie, subject to varying levels of imperialist domination, underdevelopment and economic dependency. Infrastructure projects such as water management, whether NGO-led or otherwise, often reflect no more than the priorities of foreign actors rather than the needs of the population (although calming crises and countering potential uprisings will increasingly enter into the calculations of imperialist or colonial powers). The report itself highlights several projects, but these have been fragmented, unsustainable and technocratic, with little regard for the democratic participation or control by the population. Such technical fixes are doomed in isolation from a transformation of the political economy - from foreign-imposed neoliberal models to democratic planning.

Capitalism treats nature as an infinite reservoir of raw materials for profit, ignoring its limits - leaving aside the macro-level destruction of the planet through fossil fuel use, etc, on the micro level we see in Kabul the unregulated drilling of private wells, deforestation and unplanned urbanisation, which are all mentioned in the report.

Some of capitalism’s ‘answers’ to the water crisis have included solar-powered pumps for wells to make water collection ‘easier’. Far from addressing the fundamental issue, however, this cosmetic solution has actually served to intensify the problem further by encouraging faster, larger and sometimes unnecessary withdrawals of water from depleted aquifers. Looking to address short-term interests, as dictated by capitalism, has seen an overriding of long-term communal interests.

We should, of course, support calls for the socialisation of water resources under democratic planning and control, including investment in infrastructure which serves the population equally. We should not be opposed to aid organisations looking to alleviate some of the effects of climate change (vis-à-vis capitalism) ‘on the ground’ in areas most affected. However, if such goals are not linked to a political strategy and programme to overcome capitalism, then they are doomed to failure and the fatal exploitation of our planet will continue.

Examples like Kabul are just the start.

Carl Collins
email

Buy my book

Many thanks to Vin Wynn for his excellent review of my new book, The colliers of the United Association of Durham and Northumberland (c1825), in the last edition of the paper (Letters, June 19). Our launch of the replica banner and book on Saturday June 21 went brilliantly, with powerful and moving speeches, including from Mick Whelan of Aslef, and a hellfire burst of proletarian anger from offshore rig worker Kyle Griffith. The Jarrow and Gateshead East MP, Kate Osborne, spoke in the memory and tradition of ‘Red Ellen’, the dynamic Labour left MP of 1930s Jarrow March fame.

The book is £6, plus postage (call it £9), available from me at douglassdavid705@gmail.com (or else it’s on sale at The Word in South Shields and the People’s Bookshop in Durham). Email me your name and address and where you want it posting to. If you want to pay by cheque, I’ll let you know which address to send it to - the cheque should be made out to Follonsby Wardley Miners Lodge Banner Community Heritage Association. Or else pay by bank transfer to the Coop Bank (sort code 08-92-99, account 65442360).

David J Douglass
South Shields