Letters

Simplistic equations

Roger Dickson’s letter (Weekly Worker November 21) completely pissed me off. How are women ever going to become involved in mobilisation when comrades like him completely trivialise the history of women’s oppression with their simplistic equations and spurious statistics?

The Campaign Against Domestic Violence are supporting the cases of 70 women in jail for violence against abusive partners (they did not all murder their partner, as Roger states). They are demanding a change in the law on provocation and self-defence to take into account cumulative violence and abuse. They are not “intervening in the ‘battle of the sexes’ - on the side of women”, as Roger incorrectly assumes, but are asking for the law to recognise that women respond differently under a regime of brutality.

It is not enough to say that women are violent too and therefore we are all victims of capitalism. We must also ask why women are oppressed across all classes - indeed, across all known cultures.

Whilst acknowledging the holes in CADV’s strategy, and agreeing with Roger and Nick Clarke that “the source of most violence is the capitalist system”, it is imperative not to negate the women question by giving it a tag of ideological chauvinism and thinking the matter settled.

Women’s experience as women is not simple. There is no developed Marxist critique of women’s oppression, and the beginnings of a practical programme and strategy are needed at the very least.

Jennifer Erbe
North London

SLP and New Labour

Since the official founding of the Socialist Labour Party in Britain at its first national conference in May, the ostensibly revolutionary left in Britain has, for the most part, been somewhat less than clear about what stance Marxists should be taking towards what amounts to the most significant left split from the British Labour Party since the Independent Labour Party in the early 1930s.

Both the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) argue that it is not permissible to call for a vote to the Labour Party. Indeed, organisations such as the liquidationist IBT and the CPGB generally share the foolish, knee-jerk view that any sort of vote for Labour, critical or otherwise, is not tactically permissible.

Apparently, this is because Blair and company have steered the party further and further rightwards, abandoning clause four, part four (itself never more than a somewhat vague paper commitment to radical reforms), doing its best to ditch any future commitment to state capitalist renationalisation of the former ‘publicly owned’ industries sold off by the spiv-like Tory government and pledging to keep in place the near slavish Tory anti-trade union legislation, which gives workers in Britain probably fewer rights in the workplace than just about any other country in Europe.

Whilst these things are certainly true, they represent a quantitative, not a qualitative change in a British social democracy that has long since presided over the most shamelessly pro-imperialist, bi-partisan oppression of the north of Ireland (Labour sent the troops in in 1969 and brought in the so-called Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1974). The same Labour Party also presided over the overtly racist virginity tests in 1971, degradingly imposed on Asian women seeking to enter Britain. It was also Labour that brought in the notoriously anti-union ‘In place of strife’ Industrial Relations Bill in 1976, a bill which pre-dated the Tories’ own anti-union onslaught in the 1980s. And the same Labour Party dutifully backed the meddlesome American imperialist incursion (thankfully defeated) into Vietnam in the l960s.

In truth, Labour did all of these things because, ever since it evolved out of the old Labour Representation Committee in 1906 at the behest of the trade union leadership wanting a break from the openly bourgeois Liberal Party, it has always been a pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist party with a ruling class-friendly leadership and an overwhelmingly working class base.

So have we seen what could be described as the decisive event, where the Labour Party has ceased to be a social contradiction - ie, ceased being a bourgeois workers’ party? We would say ‘no’ and, in doing so, challenge those who think that Labour is basically the same as, say, the US Democratic Party to tell the working class when and where such a decisive (ie, qualitative) event took place.

Whilst correctly identifying the Labour Party as still being a bourgeois workers’ party - albeit one which is selling out in opposition rather than, as in the past, selling out in government - the one-time politically healthy Workers Power group has shot itself in the foot more than once when attempting to evaluate the political evolution of the SLP.

On the question of critical support at elections, WP have made some correct criticisms of the ultra-left ‘no vote to Labour’ arguments. However, when WP steadfastly refused critical support to the SLP candidate (Brenda Nixon) at the Hemsworth, Yorkshire by-election, certain other inconsistencies surfaced in the programmatic armoury of WP. The SLP stood against Labour on a platform which, whilst not being revolutionary, did call for opposition to, and a fight against, Tory cuts and attacks on working class lives.

This was not unlike the general platform argued for by Lesley Mahmood of the old Militant Tendency (Mahmood stood as a ‘Real Labour’ candidate) in Liverpool in 1991. They then urged critical support for the ‘Real Labour’ candidate. According to WP, this critical support was necessary because of the witch hunt being launched against Militant supporters.

However, more recently, WP has argued against giving the same critical support to the right-centrist Scottish Militant Labour supporter, Tommy Sheridan, in Glasgow, despite Sheridan having sufficient support (ie, workers’ illusions) among Scottish workers to be elected over the Labour candidate and onto Glasgow city council. In fact, when Sheridan stood on the same sort of political ticket in 1992, WP offered a healthy, if rare word of self-criticism after realising their error in not calling for a critical vote to Sheridan. By 1995 WP were proclaiming that: “Militant Labour... represents a consistently leftwing alternative” (Workers Power 189, May 1995).

For WP’s international organisation, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), electoral tactics have been even more confusing. For instance, in 1994 the LRCI called for a vote for the centrist Workers List Party in South Africa, an organisation that had so little real influence amongst black South African workers that it polled only 4,000 votes (0.02%) nationally. And in France - where the presidential candidate of the centrist Lutte Ouvriere polled over 1.6 million votes among leftward moving French workers - the French section of the LRCI, Pouvoir Ouvrier, argued for a vote for ... the reformist Parti Socialiste/ Stalinist Parti Communiste ticket.

But when leftward moving workers, sick of Labour’s betrayals, and honest class fighters instigate a conscious leftward split from Labour to form the SLP and stand for struggle in a left reformist or centrist sense, surely the only way to act is to attempt to intercept this leftward move with fraternal solidarity and patient arguments that can win good class fighters to a genuinely revolutionary socialist perspective.

Here, putting their chosen electoral candidates to the test in the ongoing class struggle will be best achieved by advocating critical support to the SLP where it stands and a critical vote to the ordinary Labour Party against the Tories, as a nominal class vote in the majority of areas where the SLP cannot hope to field candidates.

Those militants who are serious about fighting to realise a real, revolutionary socialist perspective need to recognise that such a realisation involves combating not just the treachery of the Blair-led Labour Party (which millions of workers still vote for), but also the essentially left-reformist (and ultimately no less treacherous) perspective of the SLP

Dave Ware
LCMRCI

Off the rails

The Weekly Worker has built a strong reputation as a paper open to debate from all sections of the left. The CPGB’s rapprochement project, long before the SLP was formed, showed the left that the old sectarian methods could and should be consigned to the dust bin of history; that anyone who was serious about building a working class party capable of challenging capitalism should come together, work together, and be able to debate differences in a serious and at times hard way, but leaving the sectarian personal abuse behind.

Unfortunately, the last few issues of the Weekly Worker (November 7 and November 21 in particular) seem to have become derailed. The debate and reports around the SLP are reverting to the nasty, sneering, journalistic excess of the worst sect papers - those that used to be thrust at you as you emerged from the tube into Hyde Park for a demo.

Phrases such as, “Like flies unto shit, witch hunters attract all manner of embittered failures, would-be sadists and sectarian misfits” (Weekly Worker November 7) - to describe SLP member Tony Goss and the Stalin Society - are unacceptable and should be confined to those who have indulged too liberally of ale, not printed as informed comment.

Likewise, the article ‘Strange Alliance’ (Weekly Worker November 21) has a sneering attitude towards the Economic and Philosophical Science Review. While containing legitimate comment regarding the political direction EPSR comrades have taken, it then attacks the EPSR editor in the nastiest personal terms: “Having requested and then apparently declined CPGB membership - it required disciplined work, without the cash payments he felt entitled to ...” This implies the comrade was involved in some kind of financial corruption, or at least questions his integrity as a communist.

I have known and worked with this comrade and others from the EPSR in the SLP. I have never had reason to question their integrity. Their politics have been somewhat interesting and their editor is no shrinking violet when it comes to putting his point across. I have always found that they have conducted themselves in a comradely manner even after fierce argument.

Comrades! It is time to stop this descent into the gutter of sectarianism. Many comrades around the Weekly Worker and SLP have past histories they might be glad to forget and leave behind. If the Weekly Worker is still serious with its rapprochement project, let us hope those responsible for writing and printing these aberrations put their house in order. Get the steam crane out and re-rail the Weekly Worker. A good start would be a retraction and apology. Remember: those who play with fire are likely to get seriously burnt.

Peter Smithy
Exeter