Letters

So be it

I am writing in response to Roger Dickson’s letter (Weekly Worker November 21) concerning domestic violence. He is wrong to dismiss Nick Clarke’s call to support the Campaign Against Domestic Violence which he criticises for its bias towards women.

Whilst it may be true, as the ‘Panorama’ programme stated, that men experience more violence from female partners than vice versa (although personally I believe that research was seriously flawed), the present capitalist system ensures that women suffer far more than men when they are involved in a violent relationship.

The fact that women are paid less than men, are more likely to be in part-time work or unemployed, and take a vastly disproportionate share of childcare responsibility means that it is often impossible for them to leave a violent partner, whereas it is often a lot easier for men to do so. Small wonder that so many women see murder as their only option.

Whilst the ultimate aim must be the overthrow, rather than the reform of the capitalist state, what are we supposed to do in the meantime? It would be small comfort to a woman I know who is now permanently disabled as a result of the violence she suffered from her partner to be told, ‘Come the revolution, domestic violence will be a thing of the past’.

Men (and women) must be educated now to understand that domestic violence, whether misdirected or not, is unacceptable, and if that means state-run rehabilitation programmes, then so be it.

Julie Mills
West London

100 years of health

‘Hand on heart, it’s a miracle’ by Brian Sewell (Evening Standard November 19 1996) is yet another example of the NHS’s current alarming condition.

I am the chair of FILEF, one of the largest Italian cultural associations in the UK, and I think with great discomfort of the possibility of an Italian citizen, or any other person for that matter, being at the mercy of a ‘randomised’ and partly privatised national health service, which may or may not save your life depending on how many people are in front of you waiting for a simple medical test.

Mr Sewell is a well-known journalist, an English citizen, and had the advantage of wealthy and generous friends paying a huge and scandalous hospital bill for him. But what would have happened if a friendless Mr Mario Rossi or a Mr Joe Bloggs had been in his situation?

OK, history is not made by ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. However, two days ago in Italy - a country torn apart by corruption scandals, Signor Bossi’s wish of secession and middle class unrest over the infamous Euro-tax - a successful heart transplant operation was carried out in a state hospital in Naples (the equivalent of the English NHS) on a Senegalese citizen - for the record, an illegal immigrant who by Italian law has no right to any kind of assistance - all free of charge.

But fear not, the attack on the Italian welfare system by the so-called centre-left “Olive-Tree” coalition has only just begun, and we patiently await the English example of neoliberalism and dismantling of the welfare state being exported to Italy too, to enable us to happily join the European single currency of the European ‘premier league’ of civilised democracies.

While in England we all think about whether it is really worth financing private companies for the supply of water, gas, electricity and - very soon - medical treatment, Mr Sewell can ponder over the prospect of suing the Chelsea and Westminster hospital for medical negligence and breach of duty, and also over the possibility of immediately taking a plane to Naples if he starts feeling unwell. Hurry! It’s all free there, while stocks last. Hand on heart, Mr Sewell, I wish you 100 years of health and happiness!

Andy Vitali
FILEF, London

IBT opportunism

Trotsky used to say that sectarians are opportunists who are afraid of themselves. The most sectarian groups are capable of moving in the most opportunist of directions. One example of that is the International Bolshevik Tendency’s liquidation into the British SLP.

The IBT is an international grouping with a small nucleus in New Zealand, North America, Germany and recently England. They originated in the early 1980s as the External Tendency of the Spartacists. They share with their mother organisation the same sectarian method towards anti-imperialist struggles and workers’ resistance against Stalinist dictatorships. They actively supported the bureaucratic coups d’état in Poland (198l) and Russia (1991) and they refused to give critical but unconditional support to the Irish anti-British resistance.

Immediately after Arthur Scargill’s call for a Socialist Labour Party they decided to enter the SLP and dissolve themselves inside it, and called on the rest of the left to do the same.

In a letter sent to the “friends” of the IBT in Britain they announced their decision to “liquidate our separate organisation” into the SLP. “The SLP is not a labour party of the counterrevolutionary, pro-imperialist type. On the contrary, its militants have split away from just such a party with the aim of building something qualitatively better. We share this aspiration and are therefore dissolving our separate organisation in order to help them do so. We call on all subjective socialists and communists who agree with the necessity for a new, genuinely socialist and revolutionary workers’ party to do the same and join the SLP.”

What happened to the group which often criticised the rest of the left for adapting to reformism? Now they are asking the left to not only conciliate but to dissolve itself into a new left reformist formation with the aim of building an eclectic amalgam.

The IBT demanded that all centrists and Stalinists liquidate into the SLP as the way of creating a revolutionary party. This would not be the result of joint work with all kind of self-proclaimed communists and socialists.

As Trotsky argued, in the case of Marxists inside the US Labor Party, it is necessary to build a revolutionary nucleus as a pole of attraction to force splits, and to attract militant workers to revolutionary politics. We are in favour of Marxists working inside the SLP with the clear aim of trying to avoid the creation a Labour Party mark II. That means that revolutionaries should organise themselves as a clear opposition with a clear programme. When Workers Power attacked the SLP as a “bureaucratically run Stalinist” and “reformist sect” whose candidates should not be voted for anywhere, they made making a sectarian and pro-Labour mistake. Nevertheless, the ex-IBT comrades are making another big mistake because they simply decided to accommodate to reformist policies and structures.

Inside the SLP the ex-IBT comrades are not organising any opposition. The SLP left is trying to unite against reformism and bureaucracy. The ex-IBT comrades are opposed to the left grouping within the SLP, the Revolutionary Platform. Their main aim is to present themselves as very loyal members of the SLP apparatus and to try to conquer positions inside it.

Trotsky adopted the policy of entryism in 1933-34, when the social democratic parties, after Hitler’s victory in Germany, were generating leftwing tendencies. His aim was to try to intervene in them and to assist them in going in a revolutionary direction. Entryism meant that it was necessary to have a clear revolutionary line and not to adapt to the apparatus.

This tactic was transformed into a strategy by Michel Pablo, the leader of the Fourth International since the late 1940s. Pablo proposed the deep entryism of the Fourth International sections into the Stalinist parties with the aim of pushing them in a revolutionary direction. For Trotsky entryism was a relatively short-term tactic with the aim of establishing a left faction inside reformism. For Pablo entryism became liquidationism.

The IBT considers that Pabloism destroyed the Fourth International. Nevertheless, they are proposing an even deeper entryism.

The policies of the former British IBT are completely endorsed in the last 1917, the journal of the IBT, which is mostly dedicated to the British SLP. The IBT heavily attacked all the rest of the left for being “centrist” and for adopting a sectarian attitude towards the SLP. How do they characterise the SLP? They say that it is a progressive left split from Labour, but they refrain from criticising Scargill or the SLP as left reformist or even centrist.

While the IBT have an aggressive attitude towards the rest of the British left, it has a soft attitude to a party which hasn’t broken with Labourism.

Scargill is against making an electoral alliance with any force to his left, despite the fact that Militant Labour has many more members and they expressed their willingness to do that. His constitution forbids the affiliation of any left group. His aim is to try to recruit left Labour MPs, trade union bureaucrats and entire unions.

The SLP’s structure is not a democratic centralist one. The branches don’t meet regularly with the aim of discussing daily policies, to elaborate collectively the party’s line or to discuss how to intervene in conflicts. Several oppositionists have been expelled or witch hunted.

Revolutionaries inside the SLP should fight for a more democratic regime; for a revolutionary opposition; for putting the party into the streets and in places where the SLP wants to stand in elections; for making electoral blocs with left Labourites and unions, with ML and the significant Scottish Socialist Alliance. The IBT is not promoting most of these ideas in its journal.

Like Pablo, the IBT is promoting the creation of left reformist machines in which the far left has to dissolve itself. After around 15 years of existence the IBT remains a tiny sectarian grouping. Today, they are moving in an opportunist direction in a desperate bid to overcome their isolation. As opportunists they will no longer have to live in fear of themselves.

Communist Workers Group
New Zealand LCMRCI

Shrinking minimum

On the eve of the British TUC conference in 1995 the Workers Power group was arguing that: “All workers should be pushing for a legally guaranteed minimum of £8 (gross wage) an hour” (Workers Power September 1995).

This particular figure did not appear to be based on anything concrete, although perhaps WP were attempting to keep ahead of the bourgeois European Union because: “While £4.15 is better than no figure at all, it is still a poverty wage, nearly £2 below the decency threshold” (ibid).

So far so good, as the £8 WP have quoted could be read as an attempt to activate a transitional demand, as any real workers’ struggle for such a figure would almost certainly bring workers into a direct conflict with the big financiers and even the capitalist state.

Twelve months on and on the eve of the 1996 TUC conference, WP are now arguing that: “The EU has established a decency threshold of around £6 an hour: why should British workers earn less?” (Workers Power September 1996) Why indeed! However, this is not the end of the matter, as WP has continued by adding: “As a safety net to protect the most exploited and vulnerable sections of the workforce, we need a national minimum wage of £6 an hour, and it is this that socialists and trade unionists will need to be campaigning for up and down the country in the months and years to come” (ibid).

Clearly there is nothing wrong with revolutionaries raising arguments about minimum standards, wages, etc. However, WP has made no mention of the sliding scale of hours and wages, even in a propagandistic form.

The increasingly eel-like WP have quietly dropped their 1995 call for a minimum wage of £8 an hour - with no public explanation whatsoever (unless WP think that the cost of living for workers has actually gone down during the past 12 months). How sad that in this respect WP has quietly dropped the task of attempting to raise Trotskyist transitional demands in the workers’ movement (hoping that nobody will notice perhaps?).

Instead WP appears content to put a left face on its current (and, we trust, unrewarding) role of opportunistically cheerleading for a bunch of bloated bureaucrats in Brussels.

GS Usher
Birmingham