Letters

Lost opportunity

A West London public meeting on Tuesday night heard Arthur Scargill make a call for all socialists to join the SLP. But on being questioned he made clear that members of other organisations certainly could not join or be involved in the process. He cited the usual ‘You can’t play for two teams’ example to illustrate the impossibility of being members of two organisations. Bad analogy - at the very least it flies in the face of all sporting reality. What about Gazza and all the other English team members who have no difficulty at all also playing for their club sides.

Arthur said that if he can leave the Labour Party to set up the SLP we should all do the same. If its good enough for him it should be good enough for the rest of us. But just because he has now decided - quite rightly - that the Labour Party is dead for socialism does not mean the rest of the British left is! Why should organisations of militant revolutionary workers dissolve their politics and traditions at a drop of a hat, and for an improbable future in the SLP? No, the only positive thing to do is to democratically involve all organisations as well as individuals in this process. This opportunity - as I pointed out - is being lost. Socialists in Britain today are in fact being blocked from joining the SLP.

Arthur went on to talk about a “shadowy organisation” in the Labour Party “which he would not name” that he had unwittingly defended against expulsions. He said he only found out afterwards who they were and was upset. This is, in his words, “no way to conduct politics”. It does seem strange that Arthur did not realise that the Militant Tendency (who else!) existed. An organisation of 7,000 with a weekly paper, MPs, a council in Liverpool and the leading role in the poll tax rebellion is not easily hidden. But whatever the political correctness of spending so long in the Labour Party, who can blame Militant for telling lies about their individual membership at a time when they were being ruthlessly witch-hunted by the leadership? It is quite correct to tell lies to bureaucrats who want to kick you out of the movement - wherever you believe that to be. Nobody has exclusive ownership rights of the working class.

But even if he - naively or otherwise - turned a blind eye to the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party he really cannot now do the same with the Fourth International Supporters Caucus (or whatever their latest name is) within the SLP. This organisation which includes leading NEC members like Pat and Carolyn Sikorski is flouting the very same constitution they are at such pains to impose on others. We have published much material exposing this organisation and their hypocrisy. Naturally, I am not advocating their expulsion. I am simply saying, to use Arthur’s own expression, if it’s good enough for the Fisc why not for everyone else?

Why is Arthur choosing to ignore the existence of Fisc while denying the same rights to others? For a man that claims such honesty and political integrity, it is a question that must be answered.

Anne Murphy
North London

Our opportunity

I have been unfortunate enough to be one of those unemployed people who has to sign on at a job centre where the Jobseekers Allowance provisions have already been introduced on a trial basis.

Every signing-on day has become a degrading and demoralising experience. You have to queue up for at least half an hour, only to be interrogated by the staff about every detail of your (fruitless) search for work. Details of letters of application, phone calls made, visits to the job centre, etc have to be recorded, and you can be asked for proof that you have really been looking for work. There is a form for everything.

We stand in silence, but you can feel the anger and frustration among those in the queue. Often that anger breaks out, as one of the claimants protests at this humiliating treatment. The staff clearly hate their job. The element of trying to help people find suitable work has all but disappeared. Now it is just pure harassment.

All this is a deliberate policy. If we can’t stand the humiliation, the idea is that we give up and take any shitty job for peanuts.

What is needed is the harnessing of the anger and resentment that is simmering just below the surface. We need to carry out methodical work in the job centres to guide and nurture these sentiments. They need to be channelled along constructive, political lines and developed towards collective protest and concerted action.

There is great scope for work with the job centre workers, who are just as angry as we are. The ruling class has chosen to try and crush us in this way, but they have also given us an opportunity to forge a real fightback.

Let us make the most of it!

Eric Williams
South London

Gobbledegook

I read the Weekly Worker with considerable interest but increasing frustration, even despair.

Its quality must be the willingness to accept views and discussion at odds with the journal editorials. Its open columns are so welcome compared with almost any other political journal. While it proselytises, it never seems to be managing contrary opinion. So, where is the frustration?

The paper is the vehicle and means by which the disparate nature of the ‘left’, certainly Marxist conviction, is expressed. There are many other outlets too but, because so many of them restrict ‘heretical views’ (particularly sects like the Socialist Workers Party, amongst many others), the focus inevitably falls on the Weekly Worker. Do not blame the messenger, but the Weekly Worker is the first thing at which to lash out, or maybe the only one.

Even so, the Weekly Worker must carry some of the weight of the appalling convoluted, complicated, sometimes trivial, mostly irrelevant and gobbledegook history now 50 to 80 years old. To understand most current economic contradictions and political issues, then of course study is needed, but with pressing issues of living today under the Tory Party (and Labour - Tory mark II) and with Rosa Luxemburg’s barbarism developing noticeably, then surely the Weekly Worker can reserve this stuff for internal back room discussion rather than for the wide public view. Just one example. Mark Fischer’s purist, pedantic weekly stuff does my head in! However, there are many other cases.

Starting way back before World War II, engaged in a scientific education, I fortunately came across Engel’s Dialectics of nature. Onwards then through almost all Marx, Engels Lenin (Trotsky, Luxemburg - unhappily, not until much later), so conviction on Marxism as the future became secure in my mind very quickly. Personally, I do not need the ‘Fischer’ lessons. What I do need is to see relevant theoretical and practical programmes (are not all programmes practical?) that get unified action amongst the vast majority of Marxists and even positively anti-capitalist organisations/groups.

Here are some of the groups mentioned and polemicising in the Weekly Worker: the SLP (and their other little bit, Fisc), WRP, RDG, ISG, SWP (probably larger than all the rest of this list together), CPGB, OP, CPB, Militant Labour, Workers Power, RCP and ICP. And there are other way-out groups like the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Many other Trotskyist and overtly Stalinist groups, too.

All populations have their fringe, dissident and otherwise barmy people. Most put them away out of harm’s way, but we are plagued with them all. Hopefully and presumably with the idea that they can be reclaimed. Meantime we all suffer the dispersed efforts, left with only the anti-socialist Labour Party.

Imagine Marx and Engels were born, say, in the early 1970s and were to study and write their treatise in the context of the present. Marx would probably write his Volume 4 concentrating perhaps on finance capital and Engels would have the time of his life with quantum mechanics, atomic physics and genetics. Their findings would be of equal relevance even though we would have never heard of the Soviet Union, Stalin, Kronstadt and so much else. The needs of humanity now and the world are even more desperate than in 1890. Do we believe that in such circumstances the left would end up with all the nonsense of the above groups?

So here we are in the ‘rapprochement’ scene. That is what it is called but as the months go by the proliferation increases. And meantime the Labour Party pushes us down the drain into very dangerous situations.

The large SWP becomes more of a sect every day, tail-ending potentially good and also useless projects. So my early support there has declined to outright despair. Reinforcing this is this multiplicity of groups.

Most have not recognised that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were all overly optimistic of the demise of capital. Even now there is not going to be a revolution next week, next month, nor probably next year. Capital still has considerable repair capabilities, albeit accompanied by great penalties and cost for the whole world - in wars, deprivation and exploitation. The left see and suffer the effects of capital’s continued hold but maybe are not clear on the detail of the system in action.

This is why so many of these groups descend into revisionism, tail-ending, or individuals just fade from discussion and activity altogether. Until the rapprochement becomes a genuine activity then my homelessness is likely to continue. Thus my own activity is to support the Weekly Worker in a small way, continue to attend courses and seminars of the RDG, ISG, Marxism ’97 and sometimes the SLP, though their draft constitution is appalling.

An agreed minimum programme within alliances might dissolve some of my frustration.

GL Jones
Wolverhampton

One state, three parties

Scotland has its own Labour Party, Tory, Liberal, Communist, Nationalist Party, but not a Scottish revolutionary party. With the exception of Militant Labour, the SWP, Revolutionary Communist Party, CPGB, etc are all British: English parties playing the British card. All but the International Communist Party are London-based with an English national press and membership. The thing they all have in common is that they think Scotland is not a country.

Not since the Scottish Communist Labour Party in the 1920s alongside the Scottish Workers Republican Party, John McLean’s party, has Scotland had a revolutionary party. Seventy years has passed since the liquidation of the CLP into the CPGB. The time has come for the launch of a new Scottish revolutionary party. Lenin said, “One Communist Party in one country” and Scotland is a definite country. Maclean wanted a Scottish Communist Party in the Third International.

Today what is needed is a Scottish internationalist party affiliated to the Fourth International. The degeneration of the International Committee and its English section, the ICP, leaves the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency and its British Section - the Workers International League - as the only revolutionary internationalist tendency in England that is not in crisis or fast degenerating.

Only a Scottish revolutionary party will deliver a Scottish Marxist press that the working class has been crying out for. The revolutionary party would have joint central committee meetings with the English comrades, joint schools, joint international representation on the international party. The same applies to Wales: a Welsh revolutionary party would strengthen the working class in the UK - in the Socialist United States of Britain.

William Hurrel
Glasgow