Letters

RSP censorsists

I was quite taken back by the tone that Elise van der Doelen used in her letter of October 15. Not because I care much for tone, or other enforced ‘comradely’ behaviour, but because she does - even going so far as to sign an open letter calling for the censorship of unpleasant literature.

These censorists claimed that articles written for an external satirical magazine broke the code of conduct of the ‘party’, eventually leading to the authors being sanctioned by the party board. I can tell you that the letter of van der Doelen too breaks the bizarre code of conduct of our ‘party’ - perhaps she finally feels safe to do so outside of the safe space of the Revolutionary Socialist Party. This hypocrisy shows the nature of speech controls in general.

The support for the party as a ‘safe space’ is a common characteristic of both the ‘partyist’ factions that have appeared in the Netherlands recently. One of these factions - called Faction for a Revolutionary Strategy, after the book by Mike Macnair - even considers the above censorship affair to be the main reason for their foundation. They think that sanctions and censorship have not gone far enough and are presumably seeking expulsions. A few members of this faction also used this code of conduct to silence editors of the party paper, when they were on the national board - quite a novel interpretation of ‘revolutionary strategy’.

It also seems that Filip Spijkerman (Letters, October 8) is correct in his assertion that our domesticated partyists are not at all interested - on either a national or international level - in engaging with the existing left outside of their own ‘partyist’ cosmos. In her letter, van der Doelen ridicules the argument of the Communist Platform to engage with the rest of the organised left, because those groups are ‘sectarians’ - contrary, of course, to us ‘partyists’, the non-sectarians, refusing to engage with the rest! The fact that two ‘partyist’ factions, being composed of the same arguments against the Communist Platform, exist side by side to each other illustrates their sectarian politics perfectly.

Sometimes I wonder whether there is a different ‘revolutionary strategy’ (by a different Mike Macnair!) that causes the confusion. The more likely conclusion, however, is that these Dutch partyists are slowly, piece by piece, reinventing Trotskyism from first principles.

Jules Maximus
RSP

SNP rightists

The Scottish National Party conference in Aberdeen last weekend was only notable for the further shift to the right under John Swinney with the ‘presumed against’ position on further oil and gas drilling being dropped in favour of ‘climate realism’. The cover for this is a ‘future generations fund’, supposedly demanding all taxes raised from further fossil fuel exploration not going to the treasury, but straight into Scottish-based renewables. This oil pipe dream overwhelmingly won the conference vote rather than the amendment from the SNP Trade Union Group, calling for a windfall tax - that apparently would play straight into the hands of Scottish Tories, who scared the SNP by winning the Aberdeen South by-election on that issue.

That amendment was moved by TUG chair Simon Barrow, who is also a member of an organisation some comrades may remember from the fallout of the collapse of the CPGB - Democratic Left. It seems to be pretty much only active in Dundee now and made up of a few Scottish Green figures who can also somehow accommodate ‘climate realism’. But then again there’s no need to get real too quickly, as the SNP intends to further delay its energy strategy (already three years late) until after the UK government announces its plans. But it’s clear they are all heading in the same ‘pragmatic’ direction of encouraging further drilling in the North Sea.

Another area where there’s alignment, but plenty of hot air being burped up as supposed disagreement on how to keep Scotland safe, is ‘defence’. There’s been major joint developments with the announcement of shared funding on two specialist defence colleges and similar moves on a Defence Universities Alliance. This is part of the recently announced programme for government that aims to “maximise the economic benefits of increased defence spending”.

Another example of such bipartisan behaviour is the “unprecedented” role which Scottish government officials are playing in drawing up a new ‘War book’ to prepare the UK-wide population for the potential of armed conflict with Russia by 2030. This was discussed in depth at a conference in Edinburgh last week. Details are sketchy, because it was convened under secretive Chatham House rules, but an official attending said it could be announced that both the UK and Scottish governments were working on this together. Stewart McDonald, former SNP Westminster shadow defence spokesperson (who set up a defence consultancy within a month of losing his seat in 2024), gave the opening keynote speech to the assembled military leaders, senior civil servants, defence analysts, academics and defence industry figures gathered over two days to assess Scotland’s role in UK ‘national security’ and to discuss preparations for a large-scale conflict that military chiefs warned could erupt by 2030.

Now, if you were to look to Lewis Akers’ report on the conference in Counterfire for any of this, you’d be wasting your time, as all he saw fit to provide was advice to Swinney on how better to present the case for independence and pathetically plead for “the best advertisement for the transformative potential of independence rather than another astroturf campaign”.

Because he is a Unite branch secretary, it was no-go for Akers on oil and gas or defence, for fear of upsetting Sharon Graham or her Unite tops ilk. Clearly it’s not just establishment politics marching rightwards. but virtually the whole kit and caboodle.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

Two-way Greens

‘Do you regret the defeat of the miners in 1985?’ is a yes/no question to which the correct answer is ‘yes’.

But the Green Party will never be able to give that answer. With deep reactionary roots, it is a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of Nato and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that is leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution and of Peter Tatchell.

It was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet, just as the old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism.

Britain has named and condemned the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and an ideology that gave rise to ethnic cleansing must by definition be racist. Britain has welcomed the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the commission of inquiry that found Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza. No political party has to take dictation from its opponents as to what was or was not its proper concern, nor is any British political party answerable to any foreign state.

David Lindsay
Lanchester

DSA tankies

My hope is the Democratic Socialists of America will vote members of the Red Star caucus out of positions of leadership during our 2027 national convention. The faction identifies with Marxist-Leninism, which, for those who don’t know, refers to Stalinism and its authoritarian, descendant ideologies, like Maoism. Currently, one of the DSA’s two co-chairs is a member of Red Star. Meanwhile, there have been reports that members of the international committee have tried to develop connections with the Chinese Communist Party, and, as part of this effort, have sought to downplay the mistreatment of groups like the Uyghurs.

Fundamentally, I don’t believe Red Star belongs in the DSA. There is no such thing as socialism without democracy. Marxist-Leninist regimes, past and present, have merely swapped private control of the means of production by elite capitalists with private control of the means of production by elite bureaucrats. On top of this, they have added a brutal police state. Even if there was such a thing as socialism without democracy, the DSA is very explicitly for democratic socialists. It’s a sad state of affairs that such a qualification is necessary, but it’s in the name.

I oppose purging Red Star for practical reasons. I fear such an effort could create a sectarian spiral that provokes a number of damaging organisational splits. Instead, I’d like Marxist-Leninists, or tankies, to be marginalised as much as possible through the DSA’s flawed democratic process. As far as I can tell, this means supporting leadership candidates from the Socialist Majority and Groundwork caucuses, as all the other viable factions are unreliable or in an alliance with Red Star. I believe the DSA’s internal democracy would be improved with direct elections for national leadership and some version of asynchronous voting that takes good-faith concerns into consideration.

Still, I wanted to hear from others who sought to push back against tankie influence in the DSA about what they believed should be done. Alexander Hernández has been a member of the organisation since 2017 and joined the North Star caucus the following year. He has been in the national DSA leadership as a working group co-chair, and, in addition to his organisational work around immigrant rights, he helped draft the 2021 national platform. Hernández co-founded the Pasco-Hernando chapter in 2023 and is currently a member of the Pinellas chapter.

He argued that a wide coalition of DSA members was required to defeat Marxist-Leninists: “I believe in building a broad, democratic socialist movement that can organise working people, win political power and actually govern,” Hernández said. “I’m not interested in turning DSA into a small ideological organisation, where everyone has to agree on a particular interpretation of socialism to belong … This comes down to what kind of organisation we want. I joined an open DSA. I think some MLs want to close it down.”

Maxine Kwiatkowski has been in and out of the DSA, quitting at one point for two years because of how toxic she found the organisation’s internal culture. Kwiatkowski was a founding member of the Northwest Indiana chapter, but has also been involved in others. She runs a YouTube Channel called Buonapartista, which covers the sectarian left, and is planning to release a video series about the DSA after the midterm elections. Kwiatkowski seemed to believe the influence of tankies in the organisation would largely dissipate on its own.

“It is inevitable a baby leftist is going to get into some goofy bullshit,” Kwiatkowski said. “Marxist-Leninism in the DSA is going to burn out. I think [co-chair] Meg Romer’s frankly embarrassing performance is proof enough. It may win internally in a tight-knit group. It will not win as we grow. Normal working class people are appalled by war crimes. Many Americans where I live have family with very negative experiences under Marxist-Leninist regimes.” She thought some basic reforms, such as moving certain responsibilities to staff and requiring caucus registration, would do wonders.

Meanwhile, Anthony P Teso has been a member since 2016 - at one point as part of the Portland, Oregon chapter, but now as a member at large. His writing has appeared in LINKS - International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Against the Current, Platypus Review, Cosmonaut and Tempest. Teso noted that reports of members of the international committee discussing going quiet on Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the hopes of gaining access to Chinese Communist Party officials were shamefully true. In practice, he said, this meant the DSA’s foreign policy was whatever members on a working group call decide it is.

Teso argued in favour of a number of organisational reforms. “Members should be able to remove national officers and committee chairs mid-term, through a petition threshold and a vote,” he said. “Working groups should act only on positions adopted by convention or the [National Political Committee]. That means no contact with a foreign ruling party, no delegations and no hosted travel without a mandate and public disclosure. Minutes should be published. Members should not have to learn what their own working group is doing from leaked documents in Newsweek.” Teso added we should force votes on questions that are uncomfortable for tankies and build ties with exiled Hong Kong trade unionists and Uyghur organisations.

Like Kwiatkowski, Trevor Hauge has been in and out of the DSA. He first joined in 2015 with the now-defunct Portage chapter. Then Hauge was an unaffiliated member. Now he’s involved in the Akron chapter, where he participated in a Starbucks union campaign. Currently, Akron has a Marxist-Leninist reading group, which Hauge finds alienating and depressing. He’d previously believed the notion that the DSA had a tankie problem was media hype. But Hauge has now come to the conclusion he was wrong, and is unsure whether he wants to renew his membership.

“I think the various non-ML caucuses have a moral duty to form a coalition and expel Red Star,” Hauge said. “People may not like this answer, but I don’t always think the right answer is the one people want to hear … Essentially the option is this - purge them now, or let them grow and purge everyone else down the line and see the DSA turned into yet another cultish, ineffective ML party.” He didn’t think the DSA had anything to gain by affiliating with tankies, as they turned off regular people and validated Red Scare propaganda.

Jon Hochschartner
Connecticut