Letters

You’re all mad

Corbyn destroyed Your Party, and the ex-YP left is in absolute shambles. This is while the Labour Party is rebuilding its very shallow support under Burnham, and Restore Britain is poised to grow from Farage’s gaffes.

Needless to say, the moment is quite dire for the working class. Attacks are coming, first from Burnham, then from Farage, maybe even Lowe. And what is the left doing at this moment? Debating whether it’s OK to say the ‘N-word’, when quoting Marx’s letter on Lasalle, and expelling Ian Donovan for alleged anti-Semitism. No need to mince words - comrades, this is tragicomically stupid and imbecilic. How did we get here?

In the aftermath of Your Party, comrades from different left groupings got together to form the Socialist Federation and the Connections network. In the midst of this, comrades among these made a sensible proposal: to form a debate network to discuss the key questions facing our movement, and not shy away from the fundamental debates on the left. This is the Socialist Education and Debate Association (SEDA).

I was moderately excited for this prospect. The one good thing about YP is it brought together leftists who knew each other, but never debated with each other, to actually discuss concretely how to unite our forces against the right and the Labour government. I hoped that in the aftermath of YP, these links would be preserved, and the debates and joint work could continue. But alas, the British left strikes again. We have yet to prove Marx’s hopelessness in us wrong.

Someone in some SEDA planning meeting quoted Marx’s letter on Lasalle and said the ‘N-word’ (hard R). Why this passage was quoted is beyond me. It should go without saying that this should be confronted - not only for its blatant insensitivity, but its total irrelevance from any actual struggle facing our movement. But the response from the SEDA leadership was not to confront this politically, but to put forward a motion to ban anyone that says the ‘N-word’ and also ban Ian Donovan.

On the ‘N-word’ issue, frankly I’m not familiar with the context in which this quote was uttered, so I won’t comment on how best to deal with this concrete situation. All I can say is that I am sceptical that a blanket exclusion of anyone who quotes a racist slur without racist intent will clarify why comrades shouldn’t be fast and loose with quoting these words.

On Ian Donovan, I think it’s quite clear why we should not exclude him from debates. His views on Jews are not far from the classic anti-Semitic trope of a Jewish cabal secretly running the world. However, this view is unfortunately becoming increasingly dominant amongst the pro-Palestine movement in its downfall, especially among immigrant and Muslim layers. As long as Ian and his like-minded comrades don’t spout open hatred or calls for violence against Jews, it’s worth debating these ideas to show how they actually disarm our movement from fighting the pro-imperialist leadership of the Palestine struggle. Excluding Ian only lets him and his comrades dig their hole even deeper, and prevents us from testing how to actually deal with this existing reactionary consciousness in the movement.

SEDA’s response to the backlash against this proposal was incredibly bureaucratic - closing down the chat, and restarting SEDA, open only to people who agree with excluding Ian and banning any person that has quoted the N-word, even without racist intent.

On this, I agree with the Weekly Worker. However, the problem with SEDA’s approach isn’t just its moralism and bureaucratism, but the fact that it fed into the absolutely idiotic, libertarian response of the Weekly Worker.

Jack Conrad’s recent talk was frankly bizarre and tragic. Comrade, do you really think the ‘N-word’ is just some word whose definition can just be changed, like ‘queer’? Have you gone postmodern? Have you gone mad? Perhaps this question is clearer in America, but casually saying the ‘N-word’ just does not fly. Imagine making the argument that it’s OK to pull out the P*** word in a debate in Britain.

Comrades, yes we defend democratic rights and free speech, but are we libertarian bourgeois democrats? No, we defend free speech against the bourgeois state. In the workers’ movement, we shouldn’t uphold abstract notions of free speech, but we should fight for open debate and actions which advance the class struggle. Can someone please explain how Marx’s letter on Lasalle is relevant to anything going on in the world? How is this a key question to debate on the left?

Why are we debating whether we can quote Marx saying the ‘N-word’, and not, say, the best strategy to unite white, BAME and immigrant workers against far-right pogroms? Or, say, our stances on Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, immigration, LGBT rights, US imperialism, Nato, etc?

Why are we reading a letter from “a Black Communist” that gives Jack Conrad the ‘N-word pass’ and jokes about American TV shows and comedy podcasts (Letters, July 9)? Are communist newspapers now just for ironic laughs amongst an increasingly small number of readers?

An Immigrant Communist
email

Anti-Zionist fool

I’m always amazed by the misuse of August Bebel’s “socialism of fools” polemic that is common on the semi-liberal western left against those anti-Zionists who confront without flinching the genocidal creed of Jewish chauvinism and supremacism that is political Zionism.

Bebel never encountered modern political Zionism or its genocidal manifestation in the Israeli state. He was denouncing the crude and backward politics of the likes of the French anarchist, Pierre Proudhon, who crudely equated Jews with capitalism and called for their extermination. Rarely can such an out-of-context quotation have been so misused of a socialist leader denouncing backward, incipiently genocidal, racist garbage to promote liberal guilt and political softness on a racist movement today, which is carrying on genocide right now.

This is easy to illustrate: if someone says, ‘Communism is Jewish’, that is anti-Semitism. If someone says, ‘Zionism is Jewish’, that ought to be a banal truism. But it isn’t. Not for the western left. Why not? Because it is increasingly universally recognised that Zionism - that is, political Zionism that is dominant today - is just as genocidal as Nazism. And the Zionist-created IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ says that it is anti-Semitic to compare Israel to the Nazis.

The idea that political Zionism is Jewish is therefore anathema to much of the liberal left. Because they have internalised at least part of the collection of Zionist tropes and amalgams that is the IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism. This means that the liberal left has subliminally internalised a number of notions that are characteristic of Zionism. Even when they swear opposition to Zionism.

Note that there is nothing derogatory about Jews in the above. Only about left liberalism.

Ian Donovan
Consistent Democrats

You’re unwelcome

The last time I wrote to the Weekly Worker letters page (March 20 2025) was before Your Party had even been formed, back when I was briefly a member of the Socialist Party. You impressed upon me then in your response, made in passing in Jack Conrad’s ‘Zionism opens gates of hell’ (March 27 2025), and lack of response to my April 3 2025 follow-up letter, that you had no real understanding of class politics and just said whatever you wanted to say, regardless of whether it was true or logically consistent. I, of course, stopped reading your paper as a result.

I am therefore very welcoming of the fact that increasing numbers of people now see you for what you are, thanks to your insistence on your right to say racist, as well as transphobic, things. However, as I have pointed out on Twitter, your article last week, ‘Karie’s clampdown and a mini-me’ (July 9), contains two important lies about the Socialist Federation.

Whoever runs your Twitter page informed me that I don’t know as much about the views of the leadership of my own organisation, of which I have in fact been one of the most public-facing leading figures, than I do myself. I have been on the ‘admin team’, the closest thing we have to an executive since April 19, and I co-authored the founding documents of the Socialist Federation - its ‘Initial platform and proposed structure’. We have had months of rigorous internal debate and the views of everyone else in the admin team as well as their political histories. Yet apparently you know more than I do.

Specifically you have said our leadership team is divided on issues of trans rights, and that we are run by Workers Power and share their views on Ukraine. In fact, as the most cursory research would have told you, our initial ‘Points of unity’, adopted on April 23, already contained clear commitments against transphobia and a clear rejection of Nato.

Yes, there are former members of Workers Power in our group, just as there are former members of the Anarchist Federation, the Revolutionary Communist Party and various other groups. The former WP member among us left the organisation partly due to the very position on Ukraine which you incorrectly attribute to us, on the basis of no evidence, and flying in the face of our publicly issued communications.

Our conference on June 28 made our pro-trans and anti-imperialist positions even stronger. So the truth is completely the opposite to what you have claimed. I don’t expect you to print an apology, because you probably think being asked to apologise for telling lies goes against your freedom of speech. But I do encourage all comrades who read the Weekly Worker in the misguided hope it may lead to the forming of a new mass socialist party to go to www.socialistfederation.org and to read our initial platform and structure documents.

Do so and you will see that in fact it is the SF which is laying the groundwork for building such a mass socialist party, not the so-called “Provisional Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain”, also known as the Weekly Worker.

We are building an organisation which is not yet a party precisely because we recognise the need for the disparate forces of the socialist movement to first come together to debate and vote on what the programme of such a party should be - not in one hurried meeting, but over the course of two or three years, with a combination of online debates and hybrid conferences, which will vote on adopting specific sections of the programme.

During the time it takes to build the buy-in for a programme necessary for the new party to likely be successful, the organisation conducting these debates must be run very democratically with strong mechanisms in place to prevent capture by any faction wanting to force through their own ideas. That is precisely why we are proposing a federal structure with clear mechanisms, by which any delegated authority can be recalled by the base. If you disagree with anything in our proposed platform or structure documents, you can submit amendments, of course.

The Socialist Federation is committed to dual membership and welcomes all socialist organisations or individuals who want to join. But no-one will be allowed to say the ‘N-word’ or any other bigoted comments, so don’t worry, you needn’t fear the Weekly Worker turning up!

Joseph ‘Raz’ O’Connor Meldau
SF volunteer team member

N-word shocking

The debate around the Weekly Worker’s usage of the ‘N-word’ has, in an entirely expected turn of events, resulted in a massive shit fight on Twitter. This has also shockingly seen a new wave of debates about the cultural issues of the CPGB, the political and organisational prospects of the group and, most interestingly, small discussions on the British left’s relationship to racism.

Now for the record, I am of the full belief that the decision made by the SEDA steering body was fundamentally undemocratic. I also believe that the way to fight this is not by using the word proper, nor by retreating into the most sterile and moronic arguments of the 90s and early 2000s on the right on whether or not to use ‘ze’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’, and in fact, by focusing on that aspect, the baby of radical democracy has not simply been thrown out, but placed into a catapult alongside the bathwater. Politics is the art of making ‘the impossible’ possible, and part of that requires the tactical ability to use some level of tact in arguments - not out of opportunism, but out of the simple fact that this is the way which debates become convincing.

On the usage of the slur itself I have a simple perspective: everyone has the abstract right to use it, but that right very much should not be exercised. After all, as far as I am concerned, if a cis man strolled up to me and called me a tranny, he has every right to say the word, and I in turn have every right to sledge him in the face for it. Even if someone off-handedly said the word not directed at me, the usage of it nine times out of ten by cis people is intended to be as an attack on trans people (and more oft than not trans women), unless they happen to be a particularly old-school mechanic. The ‘N-word’, however, is shockingly a word with a very different social context and indeed is generally seen as (for lack of a better phrase) the worst possible slur one can say. ‘Tranny’, ‘dyke’, ‘Balt’, ‘sheep-shagger’, ‘Kraut’, so on and so forth, are all seen as much lesser slurs.

Now of course, I’m using ‘tranny’ here to make the point that, just because someone may have the social right to say a slur, that doesn’t really mean that they should. I think my own record in this paper should shut down any discourse over whether I have the right or not to call myself a tranny (or a faggot, a dyke, a Balt or any of the myriad of slurs that apply to me). In fact, for the record, I would like to say simply for the absurdity of it I am happy to give Conrad the ‘tranny’ pass, though I would also request he does not use it for the simple sake of not being a massive arsehole. But the fact of the matter is that I really shouldn’t use it because there are other ways of making my point.

The relationship of Marxism and racism is absolutely something which needs discussion, especially in the context of the current nativist chauvinism sweeping much of the world. But frankly there are two discussions to be had about Marx/Marxism and racism. One is word‑mining and squabbling over the mega and a few letters which have aged very poorly; the other is a serious examination of the historic relationship of Marx and his political project to questions of racism, imperialism and chauvinism. Frankly, despite my immense respect for the CPGB, it does not seem that they have left this actual debate on the table and retreated into the same debate I have to have with my grandfather every Christmas around the survival of indigenous people in Tasmania, or the occasional rant on Facebook about how there’s nothing really racist about ‘gollywogs’ or whatever random discourse has been set off this week by demented grandparents with too much screen time.

The most embarrassing thing about this whole fucking moronic discourse, however, has been the shame of looking at the utter mess in which the British section of our movement currently seems to be. In the period where nearly every other organisation in the partyist tendency is growing, developing and increasingly looking abroad (a project in which I am proud to say it seems Communist Unity is spearheading), this is the wretched condition, which our British comrades are stuck in. For an organisation which loves to promote the fusion process of the original CPGB there is a seeming refusal to look towards an actual modern-day variant of that fusion with the groups that both exist and share a concrete political perspective and strategy. Maybe that will require some cultural concessions, but for a cause as vital as reforging communism I would like to think that comrades could grow up and learn perhaps how to phrase things in a slightly less cutting way.

I have always been quite partial to comrade Conrad’s argument that the only thing that can discredit Marxism is Marxists. Currently it seems the only thing which can discredit partyism is partyists.

Brunhilda Olding
email

N-word secondary

I have been mildly perplexed at the response to Carla Roberts’ ‘Karie’s clampdown and a mini-me’ - especially as relating to use of historical language, precisely the ‘N-word’. I don’t think I’ve ever used this word, although I may well have within the flow of conversation, who knows - I’ve been consciously anti-racist my entire life, largely given the family labour movement imprint.

Central point - we benefit as a class through free and open exchange and especially in areas of controversy. As a consequence of the airing of this article, the trans question has emerged with further calls to isolate. Further issues of division can be anticipated, cutting yet more people further away from political exchange (ie, working class politics - especially when solution-focused), encouraging the retreat into silos.

The ‘N-word’ itself is secondary and it’s more the increase in secular blasphemy protocols that seem antithetical to the ABCs of Marxist inquiry.

Paul Cooper
email

Anti-Semitism

I was surprised and admittedly somewhat amused to see two letters and one long article in last week’s Weekly Worker debating the use of the ‘N-word’, while citing historical documents - the case in question being a certain letter that in recent years has come to define the legacy of Ferdinand Lassalle.

Now, I agree with the arguments made that leftists should not lay down a priori laws for preventive language policing; any censorship we practise should be the result of motions of censure, to be judged by members present on a contextual basis, whether or not the language a comrade uses is warranted. It goes without saying, therefore, that I disagree with the move by the Socialist Education and Debate Association initiators to exploit their admin password to pre-emptively ban even a debate over pre-emptively banning certain words.

With that said, please, for the love of scientific atheism, have some common sense. Don’t make it a point of principle to say ‘nigger’. when nobody objects to ‘the N-word’. According to the Black Communist’s letter last week, Jack Conrad argued that using the ‘N-word’ was “crazy, because we all know what your brain thinks”. Well, comrade Conrad, when it comes to troubling topics like racism, there is a big difference between thinking about something and seeing or hearing it. There is a reason why scenes depicting sex and violence in media often happen ‘off camera’, for example. If even one comrade is offended by your saying ‘nigger’ instead of ‘the N-word’, in this case I see no principled reason not to accommodate her.

On to another, more important subject. I was very much amused to see that, when comrade Conrad defended his right to use “insulting language”, he used the example of calling Ian Donovan “an adherent of the socialism of fools”, because, as far as I could remember, “the socialism of fools” phrase was itself a bowdlerised translation of the real phrase used by August Bebel, “the socialism of idiots”. I have seen both variations used in political discourse - I, for example, am said to subscribe to “the anti-imperialism of idiots” - and indeed I found a 2023 article by Paul Demarty which states outright: “August Bebel described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools - Idiotensozialismus.”

“Fools” has come to acquire a different meaning than “idiots”; fools are implied to be just that - fooled - and can change their mistaken ways, whereas idiots are implied to be beyond help due to neurological impairments. I don’t mind making an effort to avoid using the neurological insults, like “idiot”, “stupid”, etc, even at the risk of mainstream mockery, but we should not claim that our modern adapted slogan is what Bebel supposedly coined more than a hundred years ago.

I said “supposedly coined”, because I did some research into the “socialism of fools” phrase and discovered two surprising things: first, Bebel did not coin the phrase, and second, he did not call it “Idiotensozialismus”. A short Wikipedia article on the “socialism of fools” phrase sources Bebel himself attributing the phrase to the Austrian left-liberal politician Ferdinand Kronawetter. In a speech made in 1889, his words in German were: “Der Antisemitismus ist nichts als der Socialismus des dummen Kerls von Wien” (“dummen Kerls von Wien”, from my limited understanding of German, literally translates to “dumb dudes from Vienna”).

From there, I found an entire article deconstructing the history of the “socialism of fools” phrase, published by our esteemed comrades of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. It’s called ‘The “idiot of Vienna”’ by Dale Street, and I think it’s well researched (if not well-sourced), and well worth reading. Its central claim is that Bebel and the SPD at large thought that anti-Semites were not idiots; they were right about the “overrepresentation of Jewish capital”, to use Ian Donovan’s phrase, and it would only be a matter of time before they shifted their focus from Jewish capital to capitalism in general. Hear it from August Bebel himself in 1894: “In your country [Austria] someone once said - I think it was Kronawetter - ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the idiot.’ That’s a clever saying. But it’s not right. The actual bearers of anti-Semitism, small-scale business and small landowners, are, from their own point of view, not that wrong. They are confronted by capital mainly in the form of the Jew ... All the negative effects of capitalism thereby always appear to people in the form of the Jew, and so it is quite natural that these social layers succumb to anti-Semitism … Anti-Semitism can be fully explained on the basis of the existing conditions, and in addition it is artificially encouraged and whipped up by all kinds of people.”

Or from Eduard Bernstein in 1893: Anti-Semitism is “the intermediary link between socialism and the reactionary parties, apparently a dam against the former, but in fact a stage prior to the former.” Or from Karl Liebknecht “in later years”: “Yes, the anti-Semites plough and sow, and we social democrats will harvest. Their successes are not in any way unwelcome to us.”

All of these quotes were selected, mind you, to persuade the reader of “the anti-Semitism beneath the surface of ‘anti-Zionism’”, which only the AWL is brave enough to recognise through its ‘critical’ support for the state of Israel and its sanguinary acts of ‘self-defence’. So, while I think this article raises some valid points - we should stop attributing the phrase to August Bebel, for one - we should not let the Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism have the last word on this subject. A well-researched rejoinder is in order.

Bill Wright
USA

Don’t say it

First, I want to state that there was an Australian comrade on Twitter who said that the comrade who wrote that letter ​last week (July 9) is indeed a real person. It was not, as some people seem to assume, Jack Conrad pretending to be someone else, so he could grant himself the ability to say the ‘N-word’.

As to the issue of saying the ‘N-word’, I think it should be noted that the core of the CPGB’s argument - that saying a word that is part of a quote and merely trying to discuss a historical text is fundamentally different from the utilisation of that word as a slur - is not itself any sort of racist argument and is not just an excuse to be able to say the ‘N-word’. However, when trying to argue the case for this, it is incredibly important to argue effectively, to ensure that nobody thinks that you are just trying to get an excuse to say the ‘N-word’ and that you understand the very genuine reasons why people would rather not have that word said at all.

Unfortunately the CPGB arguments have failed to be effective and have used the word both during the Online Communist Forum and within the Weekly Worker, and never seem to properly acknowledge the genuine reasons why people might want the word to not be said at all.

It is not Stalinism, or even really a form of considerable speech control, to not say the ‘N-word’ during discussions. It doesn’t stop any actual content of the speech itself from being said if you use the ‘N-word’ instead of spelling it out or speaking it. The purpose of people agreeing to not say the ‘N-word’ is simply the fact that it might make non-white comrades uncomfortable, particularly if they just joined the organisation and all of a sudden a bunch of white people around them are saying the ‘N-word’ and they won’t really be able to tell if there is any animosity, because after all this is a group of people they don’t know.

While the one non white comrade at the SEDA meeting was apparently opposed to banning the ‘N-word’, that may not be true of many other non-white comrades. If there was a substantial group of non-white members of the organisation and the majority of them thought it was OK if people said the ‘N-word’, then perhaps it would be different. However, a non-white person joining a meeting where everyone except one person is white might be uncomfortable if people start saying the word itself. Of course, debate could make people politically uncomfortable and intellectually uncomfortable, but we shouldn’t be making people personally uncomfortable.

The CPGB needs to understand this, and at least discuss how they might counteract this discomfort that the word can cause people. The CPGB have been absolutely overly polemical about this issue and usually, of course, the CPGB’s polemical style is warranted. However, this is a unique issue where they need to understand the potential discomfort caused by their stance and think through their arguments.

Ultimately the CPGB have acted horrendously during this debate; declaring the opposing stance to be Stalinism (which is just absurd), that they can say a word because it has been ‘reclaimed’ (whether a word is reclaimed enough for Jack Conrad to say is not the decision of the CPGB). However, deciding to bureaucratically take control of SEDA, because anyone who disagrees with you on certain issues must be completely removed from the organisation is just absurd. The argument that saying the ‘N-word’ within the context of a quote without any intention of being cruel and merely trying to discuss a historical text is not itself racist, and to act as if the comrades who have this opinion cannot be included in the organisation is absurd.

I do hope the CPGB can consider that perhaps they didn’t properly think through their arguments, that this debate really isn’t worth it, considering the significant effect to their reputation that arguing it badly can cause (and they very much argued it badly) and try to properly understand why this is such an issue for many comrades.

This drama has, of course, effected the Democratic Socialists, despite almost the entirety of the organisation being opposed to the CPGB’s stance on this issue - the fact that some of our most prominent members have been very much at the centre of the debate has caused people to think otherwise.

The Democratic Socialists, despite this, are the organisation that people who want to establish a multi-tendency democratic socialist party should join. There is no other organisation at the moment that can be the advocate for this type of politics that the Democratic Socialists can be. I hope all those that gradually quit over the previous few months can rejoin.

I also hope that the CPGB can stop sitting in a corner talking about how it’s Stalinism to not be allowed to say the ‘N-word’.

Dovah
Oxfordshire

Off kilter

I’m not sure if is the heatwave, but I thought Jack Conrad seemed slightly off kilter in his Online Communist Forum political report this week. Two small points.

I agree wholeheartedly that electors should choose their MPs and that quangos, ‘ethics committees’, ‘Parliamentary Commissioners for Standards’ and such bodies should have no arbitrary powers, as is currently the case in the UK parliament. However, we also stand for the right of recall. It’s right there in the CPGB Draft programme, as it should be. For this to be an exercisable democratic power, there needs to be some mechanism by which to initiate this. Petitions, parliamentary examination, and so on. Can’t parliament, or a future popular assembly, have some oversight of an MP’s activity (expenses, corrupt payments, bribes, misdemeanours, etc) without power to compel any action? Voters need full transparency in order to make such decisions.

Further comrade Conrad seemed to imply that there should be - on principle - a socialist candidate in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election. Maybe, maybe not. These things are tactical questions. And why not let a clown challenge a buffoon? Maybe the tyranny of distance has befuddled me, but I imagine most class-conscious voters in Clacton will rally behind Lord Binface to try to inflict maximum embarrassment on Farage - a dangerous, yet pompous, windbag.

Martin Greenfield
Australia