Letters

Real equality

I agree with many of the comments made by comrade Anne Murphy in ‘Viewpoint’ (Weekly Worker December 5). However, when it comes to addressing the question of domestic violence, I feel that it is she, and not Nick Clarke, who is “missing the point”.

Anne cites the CPGB’s immediate demands for 24-hour crèches, free abortion and contraception on demand, etc as a way of bringing about the integration of women on equal par with men. But she implies that if these demands are realised then domestic violence would be eradicated as a social problem.

How absurd! I do not claim to be an expert in the complex facts which combine to induce and perpetuate domestic violence, but I am pretty sure that the realisation of these immediate demands would only deal with part of the problem. Domestic violence and abuse in general need to be tackled on three levels:

1. We must ultimately smash the system which brutalises relationships between human beings. We must get rid of capitalism. The revolutionary demands for women that Anne puts forward are of course crucial as part of that fight.
2. We must offer maximum safety to the victims of abuse and we must do that now. Communists must take up the call for places of safety, counselling and support for all victims of abuse, regardless of their age and sex.
3. We must provide help/treatment for abusers. To do otherwise is just to pass the problem onto the next victim.

To suggest that a rehabilitation and counselling programme is somehow reformist or anti-socialist is nonsense. British justice and British prisons offer no solution. Abusers who are jailed come out and re-offend because the material conditions they live in are still the same. Just as important however, the distorted cognitive thinking processes which allow them to perpetuate the abuse are still the same. Comrades should realise that physical, sexual and mental abuse are not just products of misdirected anger against the state.

Anne says we must solve the problem of domestic violence ourselves, but she goes on to offer no solution and therefore no hope to the millions who daily endure violence from partners or family members.

Surely we should be arguing for democratic working class control of refuges, health projects, counselling and rehabilitation programmes for abusers and the abused, not arguing against them as “agents of the capitalist state”. As communists we must offer solutions for even the most difficult social issues. We must fight to achieve real, not just formal equality for men and women.

Mary Ward
Dundee

Vote Labour

The original Revolutionary Platform of the Socialist Labour Party (see Weekly Worker August 24) was drafted by comrades who are in favour of a minimum programme and for a federal republic. In the conference that position was defeated by comrades who said that their aim is not to replace the queen with an imperialist federal republic like Germany or the USA.

The ultimate goal set was for a socialist republic rather that for a democratic republic. Nevertheless, the final document is a contradiction in itself. The amendments adopted were correct and gave a Trotskyist tinge to the final platform. But the document has inheritances from the original confused draft. As a result it conflates several different ideas and produces a mish-mash which is designed to appeal to the maximum number of people on their current level of political understanding.

We will try to make some criticisms with the aim of assisting the RP comrades to think and to reformulate some of their positions.                

The RP in particular is incorrect on the nature of the coming British revolution, the role of the working class, the nature of the SLP, the potential of the SLP and it is incorrect on the Labour Party. It is therefore incorrect on the united front and has no appreciation of the transitional method.

It proceeds from self-proclamation and not from a real estimation of the state of the working class and how to relate to its present level of consciousness with an orientation which can take it forward when it engages in struggle. It is incorrect on Europe.

Participation in the RP must be on the basis of fighting for a Trotskyist platform based on the transitional method.

Point 1 talks of “the revolutionary struggle for socialism and the establishment of workers’ power”, but does not mention the type of state necessary for socialism. Though it is ultra-left to continually refer to the dictatorship of the proletariat all the time, we must understand that this concept contains the key ideas of how a working class in power would be obliged to operate.

A ‘battle for democracy’ conflates workers’ democracy with bourgeois democracy and leaves out the lessons drawn by Marx from the Paris Commune, let alone the experience of the first workers’ soviets in 1905 in St Petersburg. Though it is not possible to agitate for soviets everywhere, we are conscious that we must seek to move the class struggle in that direction.

Our tactics cannot flatly contradict our strategy; not democracy in abstract, but the workers’ democracy of the picket line, which denies the democratic rights of scabs and capitalists; the workers’ democracy of the majority rule in trade unions which enforces unity in action against the class enemy under pain of fines or expulsions (thereby infringing the individual member’s freedom to scab).

Already in the first lines a confusing formulation suggests that the left of the SLP should be fighting for a democratic revolution in Britain: that is, a revolution for a few cosmetic reforms of the superstructure of the capitalist state and that they should subordinate their own goals and class interests to these miserable aims. Bad enough to suggest two-stage theories for colonial and semi-colonial countries; suggesting them for Britain is just plain reformism dressed up in a few radical phrases.

Point 2 is restricted to democratic demands and seems to propose that the working class restrict itself to these demands. It is correctly “For a socialist republic, for a united Ireland”, but sees no working class content to this. It does not explain why “these demands will be a vital element in the struggle for socialism in the UK” or point to the role of the  trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party leaders in defending British imperialist interests in Ireland. It does not understand that the attitude to struggles of nationalist workers in Ireland is directly related to its attitude to its own rank and file, which subjugates British workers to their ‘own’ imperialism.

Point 3 ridiculously advocates that capitalist Wales and Scotland should have “voluntary union with the working class of England”. The workers in Wales and Scotland should be encouraged to fight their own capitalists and not make any popular fronts with them against English capitalists. And why would English workers side with Scottish and Welsh bosses against their own? Again confusion is heaped on top of confusion in a few short sentences.

Point 4, which includes good demands on MP’s salary, discipline, etc, says it has “No illusions in parliament”, that “there is no possibility of socialism being achieved through parliament”, and then says, “We need a democratic workers’ state.” Workers’ democracy implies loss of democracy for capitalists and their agents - there is no such thing as a non-class democracy.

Point 5 might seem to some as a confused version of Trotsky’s transitional demand for workers’ control. However, the point of this demand was to expose the machinations and inner workings of capitalist enterprises to workers in struggle, thus enabling the revolutionaries to make the case for the expropriation of the whole of capitalist society. The way this demand is put, it is not a step to workers’ ownership of the means of production, but an idealistic ultra-leftist schema for how workers could make capitalism work for them.

Point 6 turns real campaigning demands for workers’ democracy in the unions into an idealistic and preposterous schema for how “The rank and file must control their own unions” within the confines of a capitalist society, and without mentioning the necessity for building revolutionary leadership in the unions to oust the bureaucracy.

Again perfectly correct demands in themselves are rendered into useless idealistic reformist ones, because they do not appear as part of a programme to mobilise the working class to seize state power.

Point 7 fails to oppose the Maastricht Treaty. We must seek to elaborate a unified orientation for all struggles and seek to show the best militants in the SLP that they cannot be the vanguard in themselves when they cannot lead significant sections of workers. They must seek to utilise the transitional method to relate to the consciousness of the working class as a whole. They must be brought to see that the working class does not develop politically as a result of propaganda alone, but must go through real political evolution of struggle and experience, which our propaganda must intersect, before we can advance.

Hence the necessity of work in the Labour Party, the necessity for relating work in the trade unions to work in the Labour Party and the necessity for orienting the SLP militants to developing that contradiction. The organised working class is ultimately the only force that can halt the advance of reaction and begin the road to the socialist revolution.

However low the level of strike struggles, however far the right and the Blairites have advanced in the labour movement as a whole and within the Labour Party, that remains true and Marxists must continue to orientate themselves in that direction.

We must argue that they fight to make the SLP adopt a consistent orientation to workers and socialists in the Labour Party. They must seek to assist the left in the Labour Party to advance, must encourage it to fight the bureaucracy and be prepared to launch joint initiatives with them - eg, on the JSA and the Asylum Act.

Crucial to the future of any left in the SLP will be a struggle to defend the union link between the Labour Party and the trade unions. However many middle ranking trade union bureaucrats will try to utilise membership of the SLP to rat on this struggle, we must insist in defending the link. The arguments must be that the breaking of the link would be a blow to the whole working class and would render immensely more difficult the type of fightback against Blair which we all agree will be the key to the revival of the whole labour movement.

For the next elections we do not advocate a vote for the SLP or Militant everywhere. We should only advocate a vote for non-Labour, left candidates when they have real working class support. In places where they have not, we should not endorse them. We don’t support their programmes, but we support some of their progressive demands and, what is most important, we try to make a united front with the best working class fighters that are around that movement.

Robert Byrne
Committee for Revolutionary Regroupment

Simple aim

Although I have never been a member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, Don Preston (Weekly Worker December 5) characterises me as “the worst offender”, responsible for the recent “liquidation” of that organisation. As evidence he cites a brief appeal (‘Enter the Dragon’) which I had intended to be published as a small ad in the introductory issue of Reclaim the future (which, please note, is not edited or controlled by me or the Movement for Socialism).

My aim was perfectly simple: to urge any sympathetic drummers or musicians to bring their talents to the Liverpool dockers’ mass picket on November 25 and the dockers’ march through central London on December 14. I took it for granted that communists and revolutionaries would want to come anyway.

Has Don forgotten the days when no self-respecting miners’ or trade unionists’ march was without its brass band? I suspect Don is being deliberately dense when he retorts plaintively: “Revolutionaries better look elsewhere, unless they happen to be musically talented ones, that is.”

In responding to the rest of my piece, Don seemed particularly contemptuous of the dragon which enlivened the dockers’ anniversary march in Liverpool on September 28. Don’s incredulous tone lets slip that he cannot have participated on that day. Had he done so, he might have known how, as part of that stunningly successful weekend’s actions, the courageous young activists inside this pantomime effigy had with steel nerves approached a wall of armour-cladded Operational Support Division officers blocking off the city centre - and snorted smoke in each one’s face.

Don apparently thinks that to play music or enjoy oneself on a picket line or mass action is to abandon “scientific Marxist theory”.

Chris Knight
London Support Group for the Liverpool Dockers