Letters

George’s drama

Before I start, I need to state that I am utterly opposed to the American imperialist/Israeli Zionist war on Iran. However, I’ve been watching George Galloway on his ‘Mother of All Talk Shows’ (MOATS) channel on YouTube, and George’s strident ‘second campism’ is leading him down some strange paths sadly.

While always problematic, with an ego the size of Texas, he did play a positive and rather heroic role earlier this century in opposing imperialist wars. For that we should thank him. However, in regards to the present war, in a MOATS edition called ‘No surrender, Iran resists’ on March 8, George is reporting that Tel Aviv is basically “on fire” and Iran is “hitting Israel at will”. He claims that hundreds of American troops have been killed and seriously wounded by Iranian strikes (contrary to all mainstream reports), and that even a US Delta Force commando team has been captured by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to an Iranian government report. Galloway appears to be reporting Iranian government claims uncritically. The clear inference is that Iran is essentially totally victorious on all fronts! In reality this is pure second-campist propaganda.

George, in late 2024, talked up the survival chances of the Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria - only to be devastated when it quickly collapsed, following a Turkish-backed rebel offensive. George, in a fit of pique, then declared on his YouTube channel, “The Arab world is dead to me!” - he took it so badly. He has since gathered himself together and appears to be interested in the region again.

While no doubt George relies on drama and hyperbole to attract eyes to his monetised social media channels, this does point to a profound political weakness in his second campism. When you invest so much in backing and supporting uncritically various regimes, and then those regimes collapse or are tamed by imperialism, you are essentially left hanging in the wind politically. You have nowhere else to go except to search out a new one.

George appears to have left Britain in late 2025 after he and his wife were stopped and interviewed on a single occasion by authorities at the UK border. It appears that he was particularly vexed that his wife was asked about her nail polish! (Having been subject to a similar interview in the past by dint of my Irish surname, it isn’t a pleasant experience, I can assure you.)

He has since relocated abroad and broadcasts from there. but all this is indicative of the political decline of a man who once provided a rallying point for those opposed to imperialism.

Paul O’Keeffe
email

Spart workers

I was interested to read a few paragraphs in Vincent David’s piece in the Weekly Worker (‘Not a serious response’, March 5). The Spartacist League wants to send young comrades into the industrial working class, and comrade David writes: “To my statement that ‘it is much better for young revolutionaries to become plumbers, electricians, welders, nurses or even teachers’ than to pursue academic or white-collar jobs, Macnair basically argues that those working class jobs do not really exist any more, and that almost everyone is a worker anyway. He writes: ‘The proletariat is, for Marx, the social class which, lacking property, is forced to work for wages’.”

He continues: “This is a classic revision of Marxism, which dissolves the centrality of the industrial proletariat into a sea of wage-earners. According to this definition, there is no difference between a dockworker, an assembly operator at Land Rover, an Oxford University professor and a lawyer in the City of London. All earn a wage, right?”

When I was a lad (some years ago, I’m afraid), in the UK we had miners, dockers, the iron and steel industry, ship builders, car manufacturers, all kinds of engineering plants - in the West Midlands and elsewhere. There were potteries in Stoke, there was ICI, there was Courtaulds and a myriad of other textile manufacturers. There were too relatively strong trade unions, and wages and other concessions were often seen as cheaper for employers than even a short strike.

That’s nearly all gone. Yes, there are some industries left and still some unions. The stronger unions are those like the railworkers, fire brigade workers and others whose jobs would be difficult to export to, say, Thailand. But David’s plumbers and electricians are in many (most?) cases self-employed (petty bourgeois?), as they were when I worked in the building industry over 50 years ago. As to welders, there used to be a mass of them - in the shipyards, for instance. What work is there for them now? Perhaps the Sparts should be sending their youngsters to India, China, Bangladesh - almost anywhere outside Europe and North America - where the industry is.

David dismisses, among others, employees in small shops and baristas. Coffee bar employees have been fighting long, bitter battles in the US for decent wages and proper employment rights.

Then we have Amazon workers (large numbers in their warehouses) - are they proletarians? David’s “lawyer(s) in the City of London” may be on a wage - perhaps with incentives and bonuses - and so may be quite comfortable. That would just leave a few clerical workers supporting them, along with cleaners and security staff. There are millions in the UK who are not in full-time employment in industry, but merely in shit jobs getting shit wages.

Given our current strength, we need to recruit comrades who want to be in a communist party with a programme and organisation: who want to get rid of the bourgeois parasites currently ruining the lives of nearly everybody. Go and get your welders, David: we might make do with an Oxford professor or two - for now.

Jim Nelson
email

China apologist

Although many foreign enterprises ostensibly advocate team spirit, they still set assessment indicators for each individual. They use this concept-swapped ‘independence’ to exploit - linking each person’s assessment indicators to performance and then eliminating the worst-performing employees. This is essentially a disguised exploitation of surplus value by capital.

Behind this distorted ‘independence’ lies an even more naked logic of exploitation: foreign enterprises forcefully bind ‘independent work’ with ‘performance compliance’, and at every turn label employees as ‘incompetent’ on the grounds of ‘not working independently and failing to meet results’ - or even directly dismiss them. Under such rules, ‘independence’ is no longer a yardstick for cultivating abilities, but a sword hanging over employees’ heads - employees dare not ask for help or collaborate, can only bear all work pressure alone, and are forced to sacrifice personal time and overdraw their physical and mental health to complete excessive tasks, fearing that a single mistake will cost them their jobs. Capital, under the name of ‘independent assessment’, saves the costs of team training and collaborative support, shifts all work responsibilities entirely to individuals, and reaps the surplus value created by employees’ overwork. How selfish, how unjust.

Of course, opposing this distorted ‘independence’ by no means advocates shifting responsibilities or lying flat in the workplace. For example, when things are deliberately made difficult for new employees by senior colleagues, who push all their work onto seemingly vulnerable newcomers, the newcomers are forced to take on all work that does not belong to them due to their status. This distorted relationship of one side exploiting and the other compromising is never true mutual help.

Some state-owned enterprises in China, whether from 1949 to the 1970s or now, have always adhered to the same core spirit: the interests of the working class are deeply linked to the interests of the factory. The working class is the leader; everyone regards the factory as their home, upholds the original aspiration of selfless dedication, helps each other, and shares technology and experience without reservation. No-one guards against others having better skills, let alone feels anxious or worried about being eliminated because of others’ excellence. Everyone thinks and works in the same direction, condensing a joint force to push the collective economy forward.

In conclusion, capital exploits surplus value under the name of ‘independent work’; there are essential differences between socialist and capitalist factories (companies).

Li Huanghao
Shanghai

YP opportunity

The moment has passed. The pooch has been screwed. The opportunity has been lost. The tremendous opportunity, which was opened up by the successes of Nigel Farage and the Reform party, has been wasted - by the malfeasance of Zarah Sultana and the useless leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Trotskyists concentrated upon eating themselves. Whilst they were navel-gazing, the Green Party jumped into the breach and seized the opportunity. It was a miserable episode, and wholly indicative of the complete degeneration of the trad left.

Warwick Alderman
email

Karl or Groucho?

When asked at a press conference in Washington about a growing number of critics at home and abroad opposing the war with Iran, Donald Trump scoffed that the anti-war crowd was just quoting “some Marx guy”, who is reported to have said, “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms”.

Trump had always suspected that Karl Marx hated the military. When an aide explained that the quote was in fact from Groucho (!), Trump doubled down on blaming Karl because, as he explained, “Same last name, very suspicious family. These are not good people.” Trump assured supporters that he has tremendous respect for the military, but absolutely none for the left - especially when it’s hiding inside old black-and-white comedies! He then vowed to appoint Jared Kushner to a board to investigate whether Duck soup was in fact an early communist manifesto.

The remainder of the press conference appeared to bring into question not only modern-day diplomacy and geopolitics, but the basic laws of chronology. Trump explained that the United States was heroically defending itself from Iran by responding in advance to a retaliation that had not yet occurred. According to Trump’s timeline, Israel launched an entirely spontaneous ‘unprovoked, but necessary’ strike on Iran, which the US helped plan, coordinate and deliver in order to prevent the Iranian response that would obviously follow, once Iran realised it had been attacked. ‘If you wait for the retaliation, that’s already too late,’ said Trump.

He calls this strategic doctrine ‘pre-retroactive deterrence’. Under the plan, which is to last until Trump gets bored, the US reserves the right to strike first in order to stop the consequences of strikes it already helped happen. Military analysts described the concept as ‘bold’, ‘innovative’ and ‘difficult to explain without crying’.

A Trump spokesperson later added that the doctrine also resolves the awkward question of why several of the targets in this war were facilities the same spokespersons previously insisted had been completely destroyed months ago in the last war. ‘They were obliterated,’ one spokesperson had claimed, ‘but you never know when obliterated things might come back. That’s why you have to obliterate them again before they retaliate for the obliteration’.

Here in Britain, spokespeople for Keir Starmer described him as showing ‘Churchillian resolve with flexible scheduling’ after Trump had accused Starmer of being “not Churchill”. According to ‘sources’, which are usually all Luke Akehurst, Starmer had firmly refused Trump’s request to use RAF bases for operations for nearly a whole 20 minutes due to concerns about the breaking of international law. The PM held this principled stand heroically right up until the moment he agreed to allow the bases to be used. Supporters of Starmer, including Akehurst, Paul Mason and @TBlair4war, later took to Twitter to praise the approach as a “masterclass in measured resistance followed by prompt cooperation”.

Speaking from Mar-a-Lago, Nigel Farage defended Trump, supporting strikes on Iran due to “Islam taking over the world” despite the slightly awkward backdrop of several Muslim-majority countries assisting the US and Israel in bombing the shit out of another Muslim-majority country, including targeting a girls’ school. On this, Farage explained that it has long been rumoured these schools are not devoted to education, but to teaching students how to fill out UK benefits forms.

Standing in front of a long-decommissioned tank, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said that she wouldn’t give Trump carte blanche in the Middle East, but couldn’t come up with a single example of what she wouldn’t let them do. But Starmer is a ‘big wuss’, she added.

Those at the press conference back in Washington were still trying to map the timeline of events being offered to them. It seems that they appear to be moving simultaneously forward, backward and occasionally sideways in a military approach where the future attacks the present for something the past is about to do.

Exhausted, one reporter at the back of the room asked the Trump spokesperson how history will judge ‘Operation Epstein Cover Fury’. History, according to the Trump administration, will judge the operation to have been a “joint post-preemptive, post-retaliatory, pre-post-emptive strike to remove the weapons it said it had obliterated last summer”. The bombing won’t stop until Iran has surrendered, although it was later clarified that they don’t have to say they have surrendered. Trump will be the judge.

Not even Groucho, who built a career on ridiculousness, would have concocted such a scenario.

Carl Collins
email

Inspiring duo

How uplifting, how inspiring, it was to read Yassamine Mather’s piece of work (‘Defeat US-Israeli aggression, defend the peoples of Iran’ March 5), especially coming as it does in the midst of a bragging, boasting, gloating era we are told to accept as part of western so-called ‘civilisation’. This dystopian paradigm of war-waging rabidity is steeped in arrogantly blatant lies - one based upon a Nazi-esque law of the jungle.

Equally encouraging is the statement from her and Moshé Machover around their setting up of Nur (a regional collective). Surely together they even amount to something of historical significance, in the sense they could be read not only immediately, but also at any time in the future, as a comprehensive anatomy of social, cultural and political forces in play - those that together might just possibly constitute opportunities available to any remaining authentically poised socialist-communist outfits anywhere around the world.

Most importantly those two items are what might be called expansive, managing to be outward-looking and holistic rather than churning and cyclical in that endemically introverted nature of our Marxian left wing in current times (also tempered by the very hardest and even cruellest notions of realism). However, those enthusiastic plaudits of mine are ‘dropping over the edge of a cliff’ at comrade Mather’s inclusion of Your Party in her list of sources and targets for Marxist support. Where based not least upon Carla Roberts’ reporting of things (eg, ‘Definitely His Party now’ March 5), that’s regrettably, but glaringly misplaced, insofar as any such faded/jaded to the point of rancid Labourite-modal organisations cannot nowadays provide anything except a ghastly dead-end in terms of the raising of consciousness amongst the population at large. It’s a pernicious distraction from the central task of exposing the core nature of capitalism-imperialism’s paradigm - either currently or in relation to its historical roots, let alone any of its future varieties or permutations.

In short, surely completely independent methods of thinking and then newly-built and wholly independent organisations are required by any global forces of workers and supportively attuned intelligentsia? As comrade Mather herself noted, “the world has changed”, so any notion of influencing, bending, steering, pressurising either orthodox trade union or existing parliamentarianism-based activities lie rotting in heaps. Surely they’re all dead as the fucking dodo!

All of that having been said, nonetheless I continue to support the Weekly Worker/CPGB in contrast to any other mess of potage available out there. Most pertinently where all comrades at the WW/CPGB should feel some simple pride to have published (both so prominently and so fulsomely) those insights and perspectives from Yassamine Mather and Moshé Machover.

Bruno Kretzchmar
email