Letters

Critical condition

Representations have been made to you in the past in relation to my efforts to be allowed to visit my seriously ill father. Despite repeated attempts on the political and legal fronts to make progress on this matter, the home secretary Michael Howard has refused.

Three weeks ago my father was admitted to intensive care in Nenagh hospital in our native Tipperary with a critical heart condition. I believe the catalogue of distressing delays and obstacles that I am encountering has already been bought to your attention. As you know, I have not seen my father in two years and unless I am granted compassionate parole to visit him, I will not see him again. The doctors have instructed him that he must not attempt to make the journey here since it would be medically unsafe for him to do so.

I am already in my 12th year of a discretionary life sentence. It is axiomatic that those having served this length of time will avail of twice yearly paroles and indeed compassionate parole is available to prisoners here from the start of their sentences. Further, travelling from here to the 26 counties on parole is common practice. Nevertheless this too is being used as an obstacle to temporary transferees in the pursuit of compassionate paroles.

I would appreciate it if you would do all in your power to raise this matter with the British home office. The urgency of this issue cannot be overstated given that, three weeks after my father’s critical illness, I am still without an answer to my request to be allowed out to see him.

Please contact me as soon as possible with whatever feedback you can extract. Thank you for your trouble.

Ella O’Dwyer
Magaberry Prison, Lisburn

Hands off Iraq

In the final days of the election campaign Bill Clinton, cheered on by the drum beating Republicans from the wings, has used the present round of jockeying of pro-Iran and pro-Iraq Kurdish nationalists to collect the anti-Saddam votes of the previous Bush administration.

This cynical attack against Iraq is taking place in the face of growing misery, starvation and health deterioration of millions of Iraqi poor and working class people. But it was made also in the light of the effects that lifting the ban on Iraqi oil would have had. The price of oil on the world market would have fallen, cutting into the profits of the mega-corporations, if Iraqi oil - used to obtain food and medicine for the starving and sick masses - had been dumped on the market.

Naturally all communists must condemn this cynical and brutal ‘clean’ attack with the ‘smart’ bombs of imperialist America. Anti-imperialists all over the world would rejoice if the US terrorist warplanes were shot down.

Behind this brutal attack we have two big factions of Kurdish nationalists. Talabani’s PUK is getting support from the mullahs of Iran, and Barzani’s KDP is being backed by Saddam - whose main contribution to the Kurds was to carry out a brutal and genocidal war with chemical weapons a few years back.

In this mini ‘exile’ statelet, created to deny the Kurds their right to self-determination, Iran, Iraq and Turkey use the Kurdish question for their own little expansionist goals, especially the mullahs and Saddam. None of these bordering countries have any interest in seeing the creation of a Kurdish state.

But the Kurdish political scene is dominated by groups that are kowtowing to and being armed by these states. None of these Kurdish bourgeois factions have the interests of the Kurdish people at heart, nor their right to a country and self-determination. All of them appear to be playing into the mullah-led hands of the bordering countries, who are using this question to whip up nationalism.

What is needed in these countries and amongst the Kurdish people, who have no country, are communist parties of a Bolshevik, Leninist model. Parties which fight independently for poor and working class people against the tin-pot dictators and mullah fundamentalists and outside intervention. Parties which raise the slogan of a United Socialist States in the region, including workers’ and peasants’ councils, in a republic where the Kurds can live and thrive, against all the present regimes in the area. This is why communists can give no political support whatsoever to the present warring Kurdish factions being backed by their respective clients.

We are in favour of the Arab and Kurdish workers and peasants overthrowing Hussein. Nevertheless, we consider imperialism as the main enemy. Its victory in Iraq would mean more attacks against the welfare state and all the workers’ historical gains everywhere. We stand for the defence of the oppressed nation in any conflict against the planet’s bosses.

Bob Scott
LCMRCI sympathiser

Left unity

I have some questions in reply to the Revolutionary Platform of the Socialist Labour Party, printed in the Weekly Worker (August 29).

Section 1 states, “As part of this struggle the working class must win what Marx called the ‘battle for democracy’.”

What role would non-workers or those who do not think of themselves as workers have following the establishment of workers’ power?

I am not clear - forgive a North American - regarding the section on self-determination whether the demand should be the right of Ireland to determine its own future, or to essentially ‘impose the demand’ for a united Ireland.

If Wales and Scotland choose, as their self-determination, to be separate nations, possibly even in the case of Scotland with a Royal Family (I do not know how these things work), does the RP accept the fact that self-determination may not work as it would like?

On parliament, how is socialism to be achieved if not - as one part of the struggle - through the electoral arena? By not answering this question, the RP leaves me in a quandary - they say socialism can’t be achieved through parliament (and I agree, not if we rely only on parliament) but what method does the RP propose, since the whole thing is taken seriously enough to define the salary of paid MPs?

 There is no mention of those countries where workers are a distinct minority and farmers (or peasants) the majority. How do they fit into this vision?

Regarding section 10, “For a democratic SLP” is, I suspect, the standard position. But how do you keep the balance between the sense of individual conscience and discipline?

There is no definition of revolution, what it means, how it is to be achieved, etc. What are the immediate demands? Christians offer heaven as the ultimate, but usually have church dinners and picnics and run old age homes and hospitals. In a sense, what do you do until the revolution?

David McReynolds
Virginia, USA

Even more twisted

Now a Ted Jaszynski takes up the distortions, misrepresenting me in the Weekly Worker (August 29) as seeing “only complete and uncomplicated victory in Ireland and South Africa” and claiming there was no “Weekly Worker article describing the end of apartheid as a setback or the IRA as being defeated”.

But I clearly stated in the Weekly Worker of August 15 and August 22 that the advances were limited to national liberation because of the “laughable ideological limitations of petty-bourgeois nationalism” and because “the ANC and SACP leadership is non-communist and even anti-communist”.

But I argued that both are victories for revolutionary struggle over imperialism in reply to an Eddie Ford piece (Weekly Worker June 20) declaring “the IRA has become a victim of the US-dominated New World Order - ie, the negative resolution of revolutionary situations. The Six Counties is another ‘hot spot’ like Palestine and South Africa, and therefore imperialism is using the same tactics: imposing a ‘democratic’ and ‘peaceful’ settlement” (original emphasis).

Your defeatism is not that you “desire” defeats (another distortion), but that you see no victories over imperialism, as Jaszynski now reasserts, listing the loss of the “powerful USSR counterbalance to imperialism”; “previous thorns in imperialism’s flesh, such as Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc gradually being brought to book”; Cuba “immeasurable weakened” and “struggling to survive”; and national liberation movements with “no longer any alternative centre to look to”. If your perspective is wrong, this sounds defeatist, to put it mildly.

The self-liquidation by the CPSU revisionist bureaucracy is a necessary prelude to an enormous leap forward in revolutionary struggle worldwide, freed from the dead hand of international class-collaborative delusions. For decades, the USSR was becoming an increasingly reluctant “counterbalance to imperialism”, but unreformable from within because of self-satisfied complacency over Soviet world status, and because of Stalinist idiocy that the socialist camp would gradually capture the world market from imperialist exploitation, which would begin contracting and dying (as opposed to needing to be overthrown by revolution everywhere.

Only the disintegration of the Soviet workers’ state could destroy the worldwide influence of this comfortable CPSU ideological decay, it turned out. Moscow was still being defended by CPs worldwide right up until Gorbachev’s final self-destruction. For the overthrow of imperialism, in the long run the loss of such an anti-Leninist “alternative centre” for the non-imperialist countries and national liberation movement will be seen as necessary.

In the short run, the biggest problem for the anti-imperialist struggle is the perpetual defeatism of petty-bourgeois ultra-leftism, which from afar sees ‘betrayed socialist-revolution opportunities’ but which can never grasp what real advances against imperialism are being made.

By distorting my clearly stated view that IRA guerrilla war has forced British imperialism to accept that ‘Northern Ireland’ can never be re-established as before, but will have to give way to a snail’s-pace reunification prospect, under pressure from the UK’s more powerful imperialist rivals (aka ‘allies’), you make possible this utterly pessimistic cynicism: “No doubt British imperialism will lose out to some degree - not to the Irish people, but to the USA. How can this be viewed as progressive? I do not think there is the slightest possibility of a settlement resulting in a united Ireland. But a US-imposed ‘unity’ would in any case be worse than useless.”

Can defeatist misery get any more sour than this? So if you are wrong, and British imperialism is forced to concede Irish reunification eventually, you are still going to say it’s a defeat!

No, the reality is that the ‘Northern Ireland’ colony cannot be re-established, made ungovernable by national liberation struggle. This is a colossal victory for heroic tiny revolutionary forces against a historically powerful imperialism which imposed partition “for all time” by its 1921 brutal diktat.

Jaszynski’s pessimism is even more twisted over South Africa. You clearly state: “The dismantling of apartheid ... turned out to be a victory for imperialism ... Capitalist stability has been re-imposed, the bourgeois state remains intact and no longer threatened by revolutionary ferment. The socialist idea has been pushed back.”

Wrong. Imperialism humiliated itself internationally, resisting apartheid’s overthrow, because such a feudal-colonial state bastion was such a powerful reactionary force throughout Africa. The bourgeois-nationalist revolution has destroyed all that. It has also demonstrated how far it is from socialist revolutionary consciousness, but only the ultra-leftistism of academic dilettantes could see socialist revolution as imminent anyway.

Roy Bull
Manchester