Letters

Just conjecture

Jon Benson’s claims in last week’s edition of the Weekly Worker bear little resemblance to reality (Letters, June 18). They are based more on conjecture and assumption than on any serious attempt to establish the facts. As such, a point-by-point response to refute these falsehoods is much needed.

As for the first claim - that my strategy for the Democratic Socialists to be the leading group in the eventual left slate for the CEC was predicated on the exclusion of others - this is not true, or at least not in the main. I make no apologies about having very little time for the opportunists in the Democratic Bloc, who were the primary proponents for the ban on dual membership within Your Party in the run-up to the founding conference. Comrade Benson seemingly ignores this despite the fact that, in doing so, they advocated his own exclusion from the membership rolls of Your Party.

As for Organising for Popular Power, I have no bones to pick with them. Their orientation - that of base-building - is arguably correct and one I have a lot of agreement with, but there is no denying that as a tendency they were (at least at the time) hostile to the expression of political substance, and had no strategy beyond base-building for the sake of building the base. It should also not be forgotten that they actively advocated a potential left slate to openly endorse rightwing candidates for the CEC - something which was at best naive and at worse an attempt to curry favour with those otherwise hostile to their own agenda. This was perplexing and did indicate an overall lack of seriousness on their part, but their departure from the slate at the 11th hour was genuinely disappointing and meant that the eventual left slate lacked a substantive pole of attraction that they sought to provide, much to our collective detriment.

As for Jon’s accusation of myself and others gaining influence through internal disputes and personal attacks, the comrade appears to be staring into a mirror and accusing myself and others of the things that he and his own comrades are equally guilty of. Jon et al attended the first meeting of the left slate’s negotiations so unprepared that they ended in disaster. A member of the executive committee had called me 10 minutes prior to the meeting for a briefing, as neither they nor those they were attending the meeting with had any clue as to what it was about and subsequently they were walked all over by the opportunists of the Democratic Bloc. They went into a meeting facing seasoned political operators acting like amateurs - and it showed. I did indeed accuse Jon et al of incompetence: their handling of the negotiations was amateurish and left them completely outmatched. The fact they weren’t aware of what the meeting was about and yet arrogantly assumed they were the best to represent DemSocs at it says a lot. As for personal attacks, I only made one, and for that I can only apologise.

Whatever way you look at it, Jon’s response was undoubtedly worse. He and his co-signatories spent considerable time compiling a dossier of false allegations against me. They then afforded me just 15 minutes’ notice via Discord of their intention to publish it, denying me any meaningful opportunity to respond, for which they were greatly admonished by other leading comrades of the organisation. Had I not had Discord open at the time, it would have been published without any prior warning. They presented these fallacies as fact, and went so far as publishing them not only on the Democratic Socialists’ Discord channel, but the RS21 internal forum, at which point they promptly leaked and were used against the Grassroots Left in the CEC elections. If this lack of foresight as to how our opponents could weaponise our internal disagreements for their own gain proved anything, it was that the charges of incompetence towards Jon et al did in fact hold some weight.

Jon claims that the Grassroots Left arose out of a series of secretive meetings “featuring Shanly and a line-up of DSYP candidates close to him”. This is yet another mistake on his part. I attended one privately held meeting the Monday after Your Party’s founding conference - a meeting I was invited to, unaware of what the agenda was, and a meeting I immediately sought to report back on to the executive committee of DSYP - but was given just a quarter of an hour to inform them of the results of a day-long event. When the time eventually came to negotiate with others as to the composition of the slate, the Democratic Socialists struggled to find people willing to stand. I myself only stood because it was made very clear to me, as I relayed time after time, that support from certain quarters for our candidates in the eventual meeting to decide the slate’s composition was reliant upon it. Personally, I’d have preferred not to run. I am not in the best of health and - something which the resulting campaign showed - not well enough to partake in such activities.

Jon claims that the organisation put forward “a line-up of candidates close” to myself, but again this is simply not true. The candidate I was close to was Chloe Braddock - herself then a member of the executive committee of DSYP. The rest were people who had put their names forward via a Google Form over the Christmas break, plus some who were hobbled together in a list in the hours preceding the meeting. As any member of the executive committee at the time should be able to attest, we were in a dire position the evening before the slate composition negotiations. So dire in fact that I had to stay up late into the night preceding the meeting in pre-negotiations with others to ensure support for the organisation’s candidates.

Ultimately, we went from ensuring the Democratic Socialists had two candidates on the resulting slate of five. It should be noted that Chloe Braddock was not one of those two, so the implied claim on Jon’s part that I sought to advance “candidates close” to me over the rest of the organisation is simply false. In fact, one of the candidates whose inclusion I argued for was Ian Spencer. In making the case for him, I described him as indispensable to DSYP despite the fact that he had joined only a week earlier and that we had never previously interacted. Whatever faults I may have had, favouring personal allies over the organisation was not one of them.

As to the claim of me stacking the campaign team “almost entirely” with my supposed “close allies in DSYP”, Jon seemingly forgets that those put forward were (all bar one) conveners or co-conveners of the various related working groups within DSYP. They were chosen for purely technocratic reasons on the basis of proven competency in fulfilling those roles, with the aim of mobilising (ultimately unsuccessfully) those working groups as the backbone of the campaign.

I won’t go into detail as to the reasons behind my decision to leave my voluntary role as part of the campaign team, as they’re largely irrelevant and personal, but the way Jon presents them are utterly false. There were serious political disagreements about the direction of the campaign, which, in combination with campaign management issues, made myself and others feel as if our position within the campaign was untenable. Hence our resignations.

On a final note, I never wanted to be on the executive committee of DSYP. In the end, I was forced to stand for it by claims of those allied with comrade Benson that a situation of “dual power” had arisen within the organisation in response to the circumstances that led to Jon’s own departure from that body. Jon’s allies argued that such a situation was untenable and that I should sit on the executive. Personally, I always thought this claim to be bullshit, but eventually reluctantly put myself forward. To be honest, I wish I hadn’t. Jon is right that a culture of secrecy arose and power within the organisation became more centralised. What he forgets to mention is that it was his comrades who formed the majority of the executive committee at the time. I was in a minority of two and thus had no control over its decisions, so the comrade’s attempt to pin the blame for this on me is sadly not born out by reality.

Jon says my record speaks volumes as to my “opportunistic attitude towards organising, leadership and group discipline”. This is only true if you take the falsehoods he has conjured up in his mind as provable fact and not the conjecture they really are. I made mistakes, but the real record shows that I acted in a pricipled way, whilst navigating the reality of mass politics.

It’s really sad the comrade still feels the need to attack me relentlessly on the basis of me calling him incompetent many months ago. Time after time the allegations Jon has made towards my person are just provable fantasy. It is genuinely regrettable that our disagreements have reached this point.

Even after Jon’s document appeared, I attempted to reach out in the hope that we might reconcile our differences. Unfortunately, I do not think this exchange is proving constructive, and so this will be my final contribution to the matter. I wish everyone in the Democratic Socialists all the best. We have a world to win.

Max Shanly
email

Fan fiction

Max Shanly has written a letter to the Weekly Worker (June 11) in response to Ian Spencer’s own (Letters, June 4). In it he accurately corrects Ian, pointing out that he was opposed to the Democratic Socialists of Your Party liquidating and instead moved his own proposal. That’s about where Max’s accuracy ends.

First, Max argues that he put forward a proposal for a campaign for a Democratic Socialists of Great Britain. While the proposal did start off calling for a campaign, the aim of such a campaign was for it to organise an open split from Your Party, founding a new party via a conference in July. In contrast to Tina Becker’s own campaign proposal, this one was much more unfeasible.

It’s worth noting what this campaign would have asked from DSYP organisers - to reformulate its constitution and standing orders for a party of the size of the proposed split. It would have required a members handbook, rules and disciplinary process. Some tasks we at Democratic Socialists have also had to do, but with the added pressure of being professional enough for a new party. These include a more professional website, a professional membership management system, including a payment system, a forum for members, as well as setting up internal and external comms for the new party. This is all additional work, besides providing the logistics for an in-person conference within a few months (with what funds?).

For Max’s proposal, to have been in any way feasible, would’ve required DSYP mobilising the full weight of its influence to pull in all the various parts of the post-YP left, including the proto-branches, All-London Delegates Assembly, Connections (now a network), Members Charter (now its own organisation distinct from YP), the grassroots factions and the pre-existing socialist organisations still interested in organising with the YP left. For the DSGB to be viable as a party, all of these organisations would’ve had to have joined, despite some having very distinct politics from DSYP and others, encompassing a very broad spectrum of opinion.

Further, many of these organisations have had bad blood with each other and with DSYP, due to internal arguments and backroom politicking within Grassroots Left. This is unsurprising, given how Grassroots Left was cohered under a project of stitching together different leftwing groups in order to win a (mostly unwinnable) election, rather than a long-term project of building up a principled, democratic opposition to the Corbyn faction. Even if these groups could’ve coalesced around DSGB, how many people would such a split draw to it in the first place? Would a new party formed out of the fragmented ex-Your Party left have been greater or lesser than the sum of its parts? Could it have really drawn back the many organisers and independent socialists who’d already left Your Party?

Secondly, all of this organising would’ve had to be done by an organisation whose activists were already exhausted by the campaigning for the YP founding conference, the Grassroots Left CEC campaign, and by internal issues within DSYP. Added to all of that was the demoralisation DSYP organisers were feeling after losing the Grassroots Left central executive committee campaign and the behaviour of The Many’s representatives on the CEC. Moreover, how would the CEC have responded to the call for an open split? How would this have looked, when now branches are just getting formed? How would those involved in pre-existing leftwing and socialist organisations respond to another organisation considering itself the socialist party of Britain?

It was in this context that I supported Jon Benson’s proposal for DSYP to liquidate into Revolutionary Socialists in the 21st Century, this would have allowed us to have preserved DSYP’s documents and funnelled organisers into an organisation with a healthy, democratic internal culture. That said, I also supported Tina’s proposal, with its focus on political education and intervening in Your Party, the ex-YP left and beyond, which in contrast to Max’s proposal was more feasible in scope, more respectful of DSYP organisers’ time and more sustainable as a long-term project.

Next, I need to address the allegation that Marxist Unity Caucus members raided the DSYP meeting. Firstly, MUC has more members in total than the amount of people present at the meeting. The majority of MUC members didn’t attend. Secondly, the meeting was open to all DSYP organisers, both local and national, and all MUCers who attended had already been onboarded to DSYP - most of them were national organisers in any case. Further, many of these members of MUC also spend a lot of time organising in RS21 - in workplace and tenant struggles, in anti-fascist coalitions, and in liberation movements.

Lastly, while I suggested that MUC attendees vote for liquidation, and then for Tina’s proposal, MUC had no official position on what path DSYP should take and MUC members could vote how they wished. As for his argument that MUC members voted for a proposal they had no intention of carrying out, MUC members have joined Democratic Socialists and three sit on its executive committee made up of seven members.

Max lost the vote in DSYP not because of any underhandedness, but because he could neither convince a majority nor muster up enough of his own supporters, who would’ve been needed to actually carry out his proposal. Rather than be a principled minority within DSYP and work towards winning over the organisation to his position, he then left Democratic Socialists and took an amended version of his proposal to Members Charter instead. While it was one among many to pass (I’m not entirely sure how that will work), he has publicly distanced himself from them since.

Democratic Socialists (formally DSYP) has just relaunched. Please check out our documents on our website (democraticsocialists.org.uk) to see our position on the kind of socialist party we need. Further, RS21 will be kicking off the programme drafting process soon and will be holding its ‘Festival of the Oppressed’ conference this weekend. I invite readers of the Weekly Worker to attend.

Bryce Bailey
RS21, Democratic Socialists and MUC

Pro-western

I spent a couple of days in Albania last week and witnessed first-hand the widely reported ‘flamingo revolution’ protests, which seemed to be taking place almost continuously. As is well known, the mobilisation is directed against plans to pave over a protected nature reserve in the Vjosa-Narta delta - one of the Adriatic’s most crucial wetlands - for a luxury property development project aimed at wealthy tourists. The venture is backed by high-profile American capital - specifically via Ivanka Trump and Affinity Partners, the investment firm owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Albania - once perhaps the world’s most staunchly national-communist state under Enver Hoxha - has been transformed into one of the countries most subservient to the strategic and financial interests of the US and the EU. Prime minister Edi Rama - a towering figure who has dominated the country’s politics for over a decade - embodies this trajectory like few others. A couple of weeks ago, he delivered an unbelievably deferential speech in the Knesset, fawning before Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar ‘Himmler’ Ben-Gvir and the rest of the far-right coalition. Rama blamed Hamas entirely for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and even suggested that Albanian ground troops might be dispatched to assist Israeli forces. As for the anti-corruption protests at home, he dismissed them as (what else?) “anti-Semitic”.

Thus, as Matt Broomfield recently put it in a Jacobin article, the protestors are finding themselves “in an unexpected confrontation with a global constellation of Trump-aligned financial interests and Israeli-linked power brokers”.

This may well be the case - though, speaking to a few of the protestors in Tirana, I didn’t get the impression that their consciousness had quite arrived where the Jacobin piece locates them objectively. The protests were “not against the US” and “not against Trump”, a young couple assured me - only against prime minister Edi Rama. His government had a long history of corruption, they explained, and the fact that he thought he could sell the natural reserve behind their backs was merely the last straw. They had lived through “50 years of communism”, they said - though they were clearly too young to remember any of it - and finally wanted to become fully integrated with the west, beginning with the EU.

I suppose this helped explain the prominence of American flags waving alongside Albanian ones at the protests, as well as banners such as “Europe, can you hear us?” If anything, the protestors appeared to view Rama’s corruption not as a symptom of his collusion with western elites, but as an obstacle standing in the way of Albania becoming a model western country.

Mind you, I spent only a few days there and spoke to a small sample of people. But the sentiments I heard expressed were reminiscent of those at the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine. The glaring difference is that Albania already has an intensely sycophantic, pro-western government. The protesters, however, completely decouple the local regime’s actions from those of its western patrons. In their idealised image of the west, corruption, land grabs and affronts to democracy are local aberrations, entirely foreign to the Euro-Atlantic system itself.

This political blind spot is rooted in the specific trauma of Albania’s modern history. The collapse of the Hoxhaist autarky in 1991 did not just usher in capitalism: it triggered a total ideological pivot. In the mid-1990s, the country fell victim to massive, state-sanctioned pyramid schemes that collapsed in 1997, plunging Albania into a brief civil war and anarchy. Throughout these crises, and the subsequent mass emigration that has seen a vast portion of the population leave for Greece, Italy and the UK, the ‘west’ - and the EU in particular - has been cast not as a political choice, but as a form of secular salvation. Rama has skilfully exploited this, positioning Albania as a reliable Nato asset - hosting a tactical air base and agreeing to process Italian asylum-seekers on Albanian soil - in order to buy compliance from Washington and Brussels for his domestic consolidation of power.

Witnessing this, I was reminded of the critique of nationalism put forward by the German Marxist, Freerk Huisken. He notes that, because nationalism can never quite deliver on its promises of universal domestic prosperity, it continuously produces frustrated nationalists. Rather than questioning the ideology itself, they look for ‘traitors’ to depose, demanding an even more radical, purer nationalist leadership. The conclusion is always that policy was simply not nationalist enough.

In Albania, a parallel logic to ‘westernism’ applies. When a fiercely pro-western, neoliberal government fails to deliver happiness, stability and ecological preservation, the underlying ideology is never interrogated. The complicity of western capital - whether via Trumpian real-estate firms or EU diplomatic tolerance of Rama’s autocracy - is filtered out. Instead, the collective conclusion is that the country’s orientation is simply ‘not western enough’, and that salvation lies in a more perfect, more total submission to the very forces currently paving over the Vjosa-Narta delta!

Maciej Zurowski
Italy

Critical support?

To weigh in a little on the debate as to whether China is imperialist or not: are we taking into account the character of its exports? When we think of imperialist exports, we obviously think of capital exports: nation-states that frequently export capital - largely surplus capital, which they cannot invest profitably domestically - are considered to be imperialist, ever more dependent on monopolising industry on the world market. According to China Briefing, however, 64.6% of the country’s foreign direct investment has been made by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) (‘China strengthens oversight of state-owned assets overseas amid global tensions’ South China Morning Post April 9).

That is not to say that China therefore cannot be considered imperialist, but it is a factor that needs to be included in the conversation. What can be said is that 65% is a rather large proportion. That is the cumulative total. It is down from 70%-80% in the period before 2015, but up from 51% in 2017.

I am not altogether sure what to make of this information, since a lot more detail and context is required, as is the case for the mix of China’s economy in general. One could argue that China is largely ‘exporting social capital’ rather than exporting private capital. It could also be argued that the Chinese state is a capitalist state - since a fully communist country technically would not have a state - and that its SOEs ultimately serve Chinese and global capital, just as Britain's post-war public assets ultimately served British capital and the British capitalist state (even if that level of public ownership endangered the British capitalist class by strengthening and emboldening Britain’s workers).

The picture on China is complex and it is difficult to take a hard and fast position on the character of its system. But exporting social capital must surely be preferable to exporting private capital and should probably be considered as beneficial to the global working class. One thing I will say about China is that, just as we should oppose further privatisation here in the belly of the imperialist beast, we should defend China from attempts by western and Chinese capitalists to privatise the rest of China’s SOEs - an outcome that would be absolutely devastating for the global working class. Doing so might necessarily mean giving critical support to the Communist Party of China, whatever its shortcomings.

Ted Reese
email

Dead trans

Trans people are less likely to hold stable employment due to their looks. We know sex workers are disproportionately transgender and, when trans people come out, they lose essential supports like their family, church and community, which cause disproportionate struggles. I was once homeless and I know a number of trans people in my small city alone who are too because they have no-one to help them.

They turn to drugs, etc and die, but that isn’t always counted as suicide. When we march, we march in grief. Our most powerful chant is “No more dead friends!” because we all know trans people personally who have died too young.

Plus trans people are facing global displacement, including internal displacement within the US. I have an American friend who was fired because she is trans. She was told to “Leave Madeline at home” and fired in a red state. Lawyers said they cannot uphold gender expression if it’s not cared about by the state or federally. She is one of many who have fled to Minnesota in the hope of actually migrating to Canada.

Jackson Unger
email

Missed me?

Since you agreed to publish my Hamas article and then changed your mind because of my “reputation”, I would be grateful if you could let our Weekly Worker comrades see what they missed by letting them go to substack.com/@petegregson.

Pete Gregson
One Democratic Palestine

Editorial note

Just to note, the Weekly Worker never agreed to publish Pete Gregson’s article on Hamas. We are, though, more than happy to feature letters from him, including the one above. We would only have published his article if we thought it was worthwhile carrying a rejoinder - we don’t.

Peter Manson
London