Letters

Keen SWP

At the end of August Adnan Hussain MP asked for a team to organise a Manchester-wide Your Party launch event.

In a public meeting volunteers put their names forward. Ten SWP members joined the team, alongside 30 others from many groups and none. In our first meeting there was a query as to whether the SWP needed 10 members on the team and we were assured they were very keen to be involved.

However, unknown to the non-SWP members of the team, SWP national secretary Lewis Nielsen began securing speakers for a ‘Greater Manchester launch’, claiming he was acting on behalf of a broad-based group, and secured Zarah Sultana (which the event team was still in the process of doing). The entire delegation of SWP members in the event team refused to engage or respond to any direct messages.

Of course, the SWP has the right to organise what meetings they like. But to insist on joining a united front set up for a Manchester launch - only to go away and organise the exact same event, refuse to respond to any requests to engage or for clarification - can only be sectarianism of the most destructive order. It reinforces the perception of left factionalism and the reputation of the SWP’s inability to work jointly with other organisations and individuals.

Lastly it seems a group putting this event together in Manchester, set up by Ameen Hadi, removed numerous people who had been invited to join when they asked what the group was for.

This is a formal complaint to the SWP, both nationally and in Manchester, which we hope will enable your organisation to seriously reconsider how you relate to the enthusiasm and vital broad base of Your Party in future.

(Signed by the initial signatories of the Launch Event Team, including leading members of Counterfire, the Communist Party of Britain, Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century and other YP supporters).

YP Supporters
Manchester

YP Sheffield

This emergency resolution was agreed by the 100 or so members who attended the all-Sheffield meeting of members and supporters of Your Party on October 20.

“1. This meeting notes:

(a) The four founding documents were released as drafts on the evening of Friday October 17, less than 40 hours before the first regional assembly in Norwich, leaving insufficient time to review and scrutinise the documents in a meaningful way.

(b) The draft founding documents contain many contentious issues that members should be able to discuss properly and collectively vote on amendments: for example, a proposed ban on members of left groups, no guaranteed funding for branches and a leadership structure that replicates that of the Labour Party.

2. This meeting further notes that there are serious problems with the democratic process, when it comes to dealing with the draft founding documents:

(a) The promised online portal, where members were supposed to be able to submit amendments and comments, is not in use and it is unclear if it will open before the launch conference.

(b) At the first regional assembly in Norwich, participants only got to discuss sections of the documents and they were told not to take votes. Further, it is far from clear if, how and by whom the thousands and thousands of pages of notes collected at these assemblies will be processed or ‘composited’.

(c) This means that probably only those people chosen by sortition lottery (and those appointed) to attend the launch conference can move concrete amendments to the documents - but even that is not yet confirmed.

3. This meeting believes:

(a) An online vote of all members following the founding conference is no substitute for a meaningful, democratic process.

(b) All these problems amount to a serious democratic deficit, leaving the vast majority of members unable to intervene meaningfully in the shaping of the draft founding documents and, therefore, Your Party.

(c) Only truly democratic parties can meaningfully fight to democratise the society we live in or, indeed, form the basis of a future democratic socialist society.

4. This meeting will write to Your Party HQ and publicise the following:

(a) Proto-branches should be encouraged to hold meetings to discuss and vote on amendments to the draft founding documents.

(b) Regional assemblies must be allowed to hear amendments and motions, and vote on the draft founding documents.

(c) Amendments coming from proto-branches and regional assemblies must be heard at the launch conference; delegates must be invited to present them.

(d) In the founding conference and during the online OMOV [One member, one vote] ratification process, there should be an option to vote on each point separately, as well as the option to reject each document and request a truly democratic process to redraft them, with meaningful input from the members and branches.

(e) All conferences of Your Party must put the members and democracy first. Branches should be able to move motions and amendments and elect delegates. There should be no automatic representation for anybody who has not been democratically elected as a delegate.”

Tina Becker
Sheffield

Free speech?

The London venue most famous for championing free speech has refused to screen a film about Palestine for fear of “adverse reaction”.

In its refusal, the Conway Hall, which calls itself “a hub for free speech”, told Platform Films, producers of the documentary film, Censoring Palestine: “We have considered your request for a film screening at our venue and, as a charity with a small team, we would be unable to handle any adverse reaction that might come as a result of Conway Hall hosting this event.”

As the film’s producer, I believe this shows that, despite the much-trumpeted Trump ceasefire, attempts to suppress the truth about the Gaza genocide go on. The Conway Hall - London’s most revered venue for political events and meetings - is running scared of showing our film. In effect, a film about censorship has been censored! The film, which stars Ken Loach, Roger Waters and Alexei Sayle, provides a detailed account of the way our mainstream media has constantly hidden and distorted events in Palestine.

I don’t blame the Conway Hall for refusing to screen it - I blame the atmosphere of intimidation and fear the government has stoked up over the subject of the genocide. Worst of all has been Keir Starmer’s spectacular and disgraceful abuse of the terrorism laws to outlaw protest in this country. Hundreds of innocent people have been arrested for daring to peacefully protest about the genocide, and the government is now openly encouraging the phoney ‘anti-Semitic’ witch-hunt which our film documents.

The most recent example of this is Keir Starmer’s decision to ask Labour’s Lord John Mann to review anti-Semitism in the NHS as part of a wider “crackdown” in the UK. The message is clearer than ever before - do anything critical of Israel and you risk being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’. It’s just like McCarthyism, but with people being accused of hating Jews rather than of being communists.

Conway Hall’s refusal to screen the film is bad news for freedom of speech in Britain. If even this historic venue, famed for its independence, is afraid of showing a film about censorship, what chance have we got to hear the truth in the mainstream media? The government is trying to throttle free speech at its source. We cannot allow this to happen.

I am appealing to any venue that is willing and able to show the film. Censoring Palestine is available for screening at public events, by local groups and independent cinemas. For more information email norm6344@gmail.com.

Norman Thomas
Platform Films

No Ukraine split

Only in the Weekly Worker is it possible to have weeks of discussion with long texts with assumptions about something that did not happen and would not have happened!

Members of the SAP (Socialist and Anti-capitalist Project), the Dutch section of the Fourth International, did not split from the Socialists/RSP because of the resolution on Ukraine - we were no longer part of the RSP at that time or even when they were starting to talk about a resolution on Ukraine. Leaving the Socialists had nothing to do with Ukraine. Despite the enormous importance and consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP, formerly De Socialisten) has never taken a clear and public stance on this conflict.

We joined the Socialists on a personal basis and left in the same way. Some did so as early as 2023, a year after the Socialists were launched. Others left after the congress in January 2024, when more members with experience in social movements and political organisations departed. In all cases, the war in Ukraine played no role.

The main reasons why we, and other independent socialist activists, left the Socialists were a total lack of confidence in ‘Macnairism’ as a way of bringing the working class to power, and the lack of political discussion connected to the reality of the situation of the left, the labour movement and social movements. As one non-SAP member noted, “The Socialists are living in a parallel reality”.

Outside the RSP, we will be able to make a much greater contribution to the struggle for socialism.

John Cozijn
Netherlands

Dave Arrowsmith

It is with utmost sorrow and feelings of loss that I have to announce the death of another of my lifelong comrades and friends, Dave Arrowsmith.

He was one of the original group of very young people who, back in the early 60s on Tyneside, formed the central team of anarchism in the city. We were soon to discover our generation was just the latest link in a chain extending back to the 1700s and maybe beyond.

Anarchism was thoroughly working class back then and manifested itself in a variety of forms - from free-verse poets, folk singers, actors, jazz instrumentalists and, of course, shop stewards and union militants.

That’s not to say we were lost in the grey ranks of the Communist Party or tired, dogmatic gospels of Militant or the thuggery of the Socialist Labour League. God, no, we were the very essence of youth culture: the wild party’s scene, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll - well, blues. We didn’t so much mobilise the youth: we were the youth - passionate hatred of the bomb, wars, armies and bourgeois politics. I reflect some of this in my Geordies - wa mental (the first part of my autobiography), where Dave’s 16th birthday party has special mention, as well it might, seeing as it represents something of a riot in itself.

We had formed the Tyneside Syndicalist Workers Federation in 1964,when that movement was still vibrant, along with Solidarity (the anarcho-Marxist journal) and the Committee of 100. Although we briefly left the milieu for Trotskyism, we were both back in what we perceived as the real McCoy of politics by 1984 in time for the cataclysmic miners’ strike.

So goodbye, old comrade. Jeanette, his comrade and wife of a lifetime since early teenage, and his kids and loving family will miss him and his endless humour forever. You never let us down, comrade - always keeping me on my toes by checking the conclusions I had reached. I’ll miss you greatly.

David Douglass
South Shields

Dictatorship again

Tony Clark writes the same letter every time. For anyone who has been following the Weekly Worker for a while, the context should be clear, so let’s cut to the chase. Clark provides nothing but floating, half-remembered quotes and factoids. Everyone should be criticised, but that criticism should be rigorous, so that we actually learn something from it.

First, let’s look at his factoid. Clark claims Marx borrowed the phrase, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, from Auguste Blanqui without understanding its meaning. This is simply incorrect: the phrase is nowhere to be found in the works of Blanqui or any of his followers.

As Hal Draper demonstrates in detail, “Incidentally, the ascription of the term, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, to Blanqui is a myth, industriously copied from book to book by Marxologists eager to prove that Marx was a putschist ‘Blanquist’, but in fact all authorities on Blanqui’s life and works have (sometimes regretfully) announced that the term is not to be found there. More important, the concept of political power exercised by the democratic masses is basically alien to the Blanquist idea of educational dictatorship” (‘The “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Marx and Engels’, as reproduced on the Marxist Internet Archive).

Fortunately, the paragraph right after also provides us with a sense of how the word ‘dictatorship’ has been used in the political literature of the time: “By the 19th century political language had long included references to the ‘dictatorship’ of the most democratic assemblies, of popular mass movements, or even of the people in general. All Marx did at the time was apply this old political term to the political power of a class.”

Now, let’s look at the floating, half-remembered quote. The definition of ‘dictatorship’ as “rule untrammelled by law” does not in fact belong to Lenin. It is hard to know what exactly Clark is thinking about, because he has neither any citations nor anything resembling any form of academic discipline. He might be thinking of something from Lenin’s pamphlet, Renegade Kautsky, responding to Kautsky’s The dictatorship of the proletariat. The definition of ‘dictatorship’ as something resembling “rule untrammelled by law” comes from Kautsky’s polemical pamphlet against the concept of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (it’s worth pointing out that the letter by Clark is almost a point-by-point copy of Kautsky’s pamphlet). Whilst Lenin rejects this being the definition of ‘dictatorship’, he rhetorically concedes to Kautsky, to make a point that every state is a sort of dictatorship (regardless of there being “people accountable to elected bodies”, which is completely irrelevant to the whole thing, as we will get to).

So Lenin writes, following Kautsky’s assertion, that “Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.” He continues with the point that who rules is not restricted by any laws and is based directly upon violence, and that the category of ‘dictatorship’ is used to make an analysis of the nature of state power, and what category or grouping of people hold that power, based on how the state is structured.

So Lenin’s point is that the foundational structures of a state predate the laws they create, and involve power being held by some group or another. For example, he argues (as did Marx and Engels) that the existing parliamentary republics are not really democratic for the proletariat, that the interests of the vast majority of people generally remain unrepresented, that these remain only as passive, symbolic participants in politics. He also argues that this is because of the ways in which the existing parliamentary republics are structured.

Instead, he argues that one needs a form of power based on the democratic participation of the vast majority of the population. A form of power wherein the standing army and the police are abolished, wherein judges are elected, wherein bureaucrats (appointed functionaries) are replaced by functionaries elected and recallable, wherein politics revolves around the participation of people in democratic assemblies (councils) and temporary delegation of power, based on imperative mandates and the right to recall. As every communist and consistent democrat should know.

Clark might be correct in that this doesn’t involve “accountability to elected bodies”, even though he inserts that part from nowhere. It involves not accountability to the elected bodies, but rather a rigorous and real accountability of the elected bodies to the people. It is a form of law that prioritises not dictates from above - from alienated, “elected bodies” - but rather rule from below, as Lenin describes very clearly in his April 1917 Pravda article, ‘The dual power’.

People use the term, ‘dictatorship’, because it describes what a state is properly, and it makes clear why consistent democrats need to be opposed to the existing state of affairs, and work to build a political order where politics are actually dictated by a majority of the people and not a privileged minority.

Ömer Hanifi Yüzgeç
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