Letters

YP Scotland

Part and parcel of the problems still pouring forth from the bureaucratic clique at the top of Your Party is the anger it’s brewing in Scotland. This is all going to gush forth at the February 7-8 Scottish conference in Dundee and it’s no surprise that this is taking political form with a surge towards committing YP Scotland to backing independence as a country as well as a party.

In an attempt to present an alternative to this nationalist tide I’m taking part in an online debate with Richard Green, founder of the Platform for Socialism and Independence, in the evening of January 29. Whilst the separatist tide is high, despite the latest proof from Venezuela that attempts to build socialism in one country are delusive folly and can only bring suffering for the working class, there are comrades in Scotland recognising the need for unity and proletarian internationalism as the only way forward.

Gathering forces before conference as best we can without proper branch structures means taking every opportunity to offer such an alternative, and that’s the hope for this debate.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

Western fantasy

A photo supposedly showing a young woman in Iran lighting a cigarette with a burning image of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has gone viral and is still doing the rounds, including in ‘serious’ papers such as La Repubblica here in Italy.

By now it has emerged that the woman lives in Canada and calls herself Morticia Addams, presumably in reference to the Addams Family character. The photo was taken in a parking lot somewhere in Ontario, which makes her act of defiance seem rather less courageous than many imagined.

Some anti-imperialists have claimed that ‘Morticia Addams’ is a Zionist activist. At first glance, the posts on her no-longer-active X account (all written in Persian, but easily translated with DeepL) don’t seem to confirm that - most appear to be purely feminist, talking about sexism, men’s shortcomings, and so on. Others, however, have found older posts, where she wrote that “Palestine never existed” and was “just part of Israel” and, in reply to a critic/hater, that “being a whore of Netanyahu is much better than being a whore of what the media says about Palestine or any other Muslim”. She added: “Did you bother to read the Quran even once?”

All in all, she doesn’t strike me as some sophisticated Zionist activist or Hasbara troll. She’s simply a right-leaning Iranian in exile, such as there are many, with a pro-west, anti-Islam stance. She mixes that with contemporary pop feminism. Her understandable opposition to the Iranian theocracy has taken the form of endorsing the genocidal Zionist project - regrettable, but not unusual.

The reason the photo went viral is that it happened to aesthetically play up to a western fantasy of how Iranian women rebel. This is also why ‘Morticia Addams’ has become the new poster girl for a certain crowd, which included German ‘anti-fascists’.

And that is, as far as I can work out, all there is to it.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy

Don’t be critical

The US attack on Venezuela, along with the kidnapping and forcible detention of president Nicolas Maduro that occurred on January 3, not only brings condemnation of the US, but teaches important lessons.

Surely Venezuela would never have been attacked by the US imperialists if it had nuclear weapons? The development of a nuclear deterrent by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and six nuclear tests by the DPRK have proved to be absolutely correct.

Only a day after the attack on Venezuela the DPRK tested a hypersonic missile. Respected comrade Kim Jong Un said: “To be honest, such activity of ours is clearly aimed at gradually putting the nuclear war deterrent on a highly developed basis. The reason why it is necessary is exemplified by the recent geopolitical crisis and complicated international events.”

Another important lesson is that evidence has emerged that the attack on Venezuela was carried out with the help of internal traitors. The DPRK has always smashed internal traitors who were backed by outside forces: for example, in 1953, 1956, 1967 and 2013.

Moreover, before Venezuela was attacked, Maduro held talks with the US and even quoted John Lennon, saying “Give peace a chance”. By contrast, whilst the DPRK has not entirely ruled out talks with the US, they have made it clear that they will not discuss denuclearisation with the US, so basically will not bargain over issues of principle. Trump had entertained hopes that he could meet comrade Kim Jong Un at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in south Korea last year, but came away without meeting the DPRK supreme leader.

It always amazes me how British leftists support socialist regimes that can be kicked over like a sandcastle by the imperialists, but baulk at supporting the DPRK, saying, “Ooh, we need to be critical!” Are such people worshippers of weakness?

Socialists, communists and anti-imperialists in Britain and elsewhere need to learn the lessons that the DPRK teaches.

Dermot Hudson
London

Cricket anyone?

Following on from a recent Facebook post on cricket and class, clearly there are lots of issues on this at grassroots level in England:

1. The selling off of council-owned pitches makes it difficult for local grassroots teams to find somewhere to play.

2. Work/shift patterns have changed, allied to childcare being more difficult/expensive. When I was much younger, many of the players would work days, Monday to Friday, but now many more people work weekends and shifts. Whilst I am not advocating women having traditional homemaker/mother roles, again in my early days it was much more likely that a cricketer’s partner (and we need to be honest, that largely meant a female partner) took responsibility for childcare on evenings and weekends when matches were played. Add to this the privatisation of children’s extra-curricular activities, which used to be handled by schools (another whole lot of detail to add there), but now players with children are often not available.

3. The demise of school sport, sale of playing fields, etc means there are less younger people playing.

4. The demise of large workplaces with social/sports clubs attached has resulted in fewer teams.

In the 60s/70s as a kid we kicked footballs around all winter and smashed cricket balls around all summer in the field next the council estate I grew up on. Most of that field, which had many council football pitches and lots of other space, is now fenced off and not public.

My secondary school (nowt posh) had a cricket team playing against other schools - we had a cricket pitch and an inter-house cricket competition. The school is now gone and the pitch is covered by a hospital car park.

When I worked for Imperial Chemical Industries, we had a social/sports club with two cricket pitches. We had three teams in the local midweek cricket league and two in the weekend league. There was an annual inter-department cricket competition too. But when ICI split up, the club and pitches went. The team I played for got sponsored, for a while, by ICI Surfactants, and we played on a council pitch. There were three pitches at that venue, but now they’re all gone. There were another two council pitches at another venue in Middlesbrough, also now gone.

As those pitches disappeared, we moved around village cricket pitches and got sponsored by a local microbrewery (which more than got their money back via post-match drinking). Eventually, with no young players coming through, we folded.

The Middlesbrough Midweek Cricket League then had eight divisions: it now has three. I switched to weekend cricket at Newton Aycliffe - a sports club with its own pitch, played with an array of wonderful and crazy people (there’s summat in the Aycliffe air) and I’m glad they’re still thriving today. I stopped playing weekends on fatherhood (my partner usually worked weekends and we had to cover childcare).

Cricket still exists at grassroots level. Locally it is sustained by villages and small towns, and in places like Middlesbrough largely remains, thanks to the efforts of the local population of south Asian descent taking up the reins of league administration and running teams. But there are many fewer working class players as a result of all that has happened over the last 50 years or so.

Ian Elcoate
Middlesbrough

Twitter threat

Keir Starmer’s initial judgment that Peter Mandelson was the most diplomatic choice for ambassador to the United States makes both of them demonstrably unfit, and Lord Mandelson’s continuing formal and informal role in public life is a far greater threat to our youth than anything on social media.

Like banning smartphones at the table, as we were banned from having personal stereos, it would be the simplest thing to ban smartphones from schools, which have always been used to call home, or be called, when necessary. But banning social media for under-16s would deny them the formative experience of their generation internationally, together with any ideology other than that of the schools and of the official media. The people who call for it in Britain want to lower the voting age to 16, having already raised the school leaving age to 18, while many of them also want conscription.

Sexualised images of children are not free speech, nor are non-consensual sexualised images of adults. The United States has no qualms about applying its legislation extraterritorially, and any company doing business here has to abide by our laws when doing so.

All of that said, the threat to X/Twitter is pursuant to the Online Safety Act that was passed when Kemi Badenoch was secretary of state for business and trade - not the immediately responsible department, but not the furthest removed - and when the Conservative Party still delighted in the membership of several people who are now prominent in Reform UK, including Nadine Dorries, the secretary of state who introduced the bill.

At committee stage, the evidence of Hope Not Hate was given by Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who was then a well-connected Labour councillor in Barnet, but is now scandalously out on bail, awaiting sentence for offences including sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl.

Elon Musk is the least of our worries.

David Lindsay
Lanchester

Wake up

May I proffer this sincere little New Year’s message from a humble nobody to everyone on the genuinely Marxian left wing?

Well, yes, amazing, isn’t it, how so very easily one can get left behind in terms of meaningful ‘connection’? For instance, right now in how - apart from all other significant, but as such predictable, aspects of the kidnapping and removal of Maduro to the US - it represents how things have fundamentally changed in the new world order under Trumpism, including, of course, by leaving those on the revolutionary left high and dry, if continuing with stale and now instantly even more sterile debates. Maybe most notably this is around the strictly accurate or ‘correct’ definition of what constitutes fascism - where Trump’s USA is nothing if not both an openly and proudly thuggish, mafioso-like, state gangster and therein at the very least proto-fascistic operator in world affairs.

Equally so exposed is how mainstream/bourgeois and even self-styled ultra-progressives are completely out of touch, politically undeveloped, trapped in generalised stagnancy. Rubio made things crystal-clear - plain as fucking daylight in that respect - when pointing out how entities rooted within ‘international diplomacy’ are failing to understand how the military operation in Venezuela was not an old-school ‘invasion’ to secure total ‘regime change’, (ie, as per Iraq, Afghanistan or even Libya), but instead a method of securing cooperation and obedience as part of an albeit power-imposed alliance from existing elites from within the so-called Bolivarian revolution.

So, while those inordinately well-funded think tanks and suchlike ‘independent’ organisations for ‘civil society’, etc have been left behind - now utterly outdated and stagnant in perception and so only ever more irrelevant, Trumpism as such represents a freshness, ‘modernity’. Certainly it’s now in the intellectual and ideological driving seat of their ever more influential new world order, where Europe and the UK inexorably will follow.

Also to its both somewhat laughable and eternal shame, where a current times iteration of Marxism persists in that cyclical examination and reanalysis of matters, such as whether Trumpism represents ‘fascism’ or not, when the only real consideration - ie, the one of any actual value - is what type or variation or adapted form of fascism it is securing; how and why that surprisingly rather sophisticated ‘hybridisation’ from Trumpism is meeting the primary requirements of capitalism amidst its historically predictable global crisis; most specifically right now, how America and Trumpism are enacting policies derived from 19th century British imperialism’s cunning and astute coopting, coercing, maintaining in India of local potentates to efficiently enable - aka to run - its raj!

And then, of course, there’s what to do about all this from between the various Trotskyism-rooted versions and multiple others, in turn amidst a nothing short of ludicrous multiple fragmentation of our revolutionist forces as a whole. In short then, comrades: ‘modernise or die’ - or, more precisely put - otherwise we remain ‘vestigial’. The new way things are working in the big, wide world is staring us in the face. Trumpism has moved everything on, and they will change again, leaving the organisations of the international working class only further withering on the vine, as those vestigial appendages to a nonetheless still ongoing, nascent class struggle.

So in summary: wake up, comrades: it’s still not too late before those Gestapo techniques of ICE and Homeland Security and those almost surreally high-tech covert interventions in its geographical backyard, etc become applied further beyond the USA to our own ‘sovereign’ nation-state bourgeois governments. Nitpicking and internecine fragmentation of our forces won’t present any solution - any attractive and inspirational alternative for those proverbial masses of culturally and aesthetically imprisoned, tragically conditioned and controlled, bribed, distracted and manipulated, commandeered and coopted, to those quite simply lost co-citizens of ours.

Bruno Kretzschmar
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