Letters

No link

At the last meeting of the Vauxhall Constituency Socialist Labour Party, on Thursday April 10, concern was raised at the attempt in recent issues of your paper to imply a link between the campaign by Stan Keable in Brent East and my campaign in Vauxhall. I share this concern.

The Vauxhall CSLP and I have defended, and continue to defend, Stan Keable’s right to appeal against the undemocratic voiding of his membership. We also argue that until such an appeal comrade Keable should be treated as a member of the SLP.

Unfortunately, Stan has chosen to stand in the election on a different programme than that of the SLP - the same programme as the CPGB. I believe that is unfair to the membership of the SLP. It is undemocratic for one branch to unilaterally stand on a separate programme. I note that this rather undermines Stan’s appeal against his voiding but, more importantly, it makes any link between his campaign and mine impossible.

My campaign in Vauxhall has always been an SLP campaign based on the policies of the SLP and I therefore endorse the motion passed at the last Vauxhall meeting which reads:

We reaffirm our commitment to campaigning for Ian Driver as the Socialist Labour Party candidate in Vauxhall, standing on the policies of the party. Our campaign is not linked with electoral campaigns based on policies other than those of the SLP.

I, like many other comrades in Vauxhall, would support a critical vote for Stan in the absence of a candidate standing on SLP policy in Brent East - just as I support critical votes for other pro-working class candidates, such as the Socialist Party, where the SLP is not standing. However, I would like to make it absolutely clear that there is no link between Stan Keable’s campaign and my own.

I hope that this clarifies the situation and that you will print this letter at the earliest possible opportunity and will in future desist from implying a link between the campaigns where such a link does not exist.

Ian Driver
SLP parliamentary candidate for Vauxhall

Encouraging illusions

The Scottish Socialist Alliance’s women’s officer, Ann Morgan, is correct to recognise that the term ‘bourgeois feminism’ has been used to isolate, ostracise and silence those militants who are committed to thinking about the relationship between women’s liberation and socialism (see Weekly Worker April 10).

On the other hand, it does not follow from the term’s misuse that the category it identifies has no social content.

It is true that many left-leaning men respond violently or bureaucratically to attempts to put the question of women’s oppression on the agenda for discussion and action. It is also true that some of these are likely to do this under the pretext of maintaining the purity of ‘Marxist-Leninist doctrine’.

An undemocratic culture of Stalinised political activism has turned what passes as Marxism into a form of unthinking, paranoid bureau-babble. At the same time, this culture has both shielded working class leaders from criticism of their sexism and encouraged the illusion that feminism is the only force capable of re-moralising, educating and humanising the left.

This recent history has a bearing on the fact that almost all contemporary ‘post-Marxist’ feminists are now hostile to Marxism. Like those Scottish and Irish nationalists who claim to be the true inheritors of the communist legacy of Maclean and Connolly, Morgan, for instance, blithely distorts history by suggesting that a commitment to women’s liberation transforms a Marxist, such as Rosa Luxembourg, into a feminist.

The classical Marxist position is, of course, that feminism is a form of bourgeois ideology. This entails that it reproduces and reflects false consciousness. Feminist consciousness, like every other form of ideology, is grounded upon a distorted understanding of reality.

This reality is the experience of women’s and children’s oppression in all forms of society that reproduce the alienation of labour power. This holds true regardless of whether they be capitalist, pre-capitalist, or bureaucratically administered social forms.

The failure of the French and Russian revolutions to liberate women and children means that their oppression will continue to be a real issue in the transition to a rationally planned, democratic, classless society worldwide. For example, the demand for 24-hour, free child care is an essential transitional demand.

In contrast, feminism offers utopian and therefore partial solutions to a global problem. In this respect, it is analogous to Stalinism, social democracy, nationalism and anarchism.

Feminism tends to oscillate between a ‘revolutionary’ solution: the withdrawal of women’s labour from men and the establishment of anarchistic all-women households, networks and communities; and a ‘reformist’ solution: the implementation of a programme of welfare, childcare and educational measures through the social democratic state. Both are utopian because they imply that women’s equality is achievable within a limited sphere of bourgeois society. They are analogous to the utopian ideas that socialism is possible within one household, community, city or nation.

Working class feminists are trapped within these limits. Correctly unwilling to abandon and attack men as the ‘enemy’, they are pulled back and forth between partial anarchist and social democratic solutions.

It is no surprise, therefore, to read of Morgan’s positive affirmation of the “socialist advances” and “improved conditions for women” achieved by the ANC in South Africa and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Feminist thinkers have tended to uncritically reproduce a bourgeois consensus that Stalinist regimes and social democratic parties are in some way socialist.

Feminists continue to perpetuate the illusion that social democratic, nationalist and anarchist policies are revolutionary. The result is a curious variant of the two-stage Stalinist doctrine of liberation: first, a feminist revolution led by women and their anti-sexist male allies - then, a socialist or communist one led by working class women and their properly educated male partners, brothers and sons.

In both cases, the liberation of working class women and children depends on whether a small section of the left intelligentsia can seize power and determine the future of bourgeois society. Following the example of the victories of the ANC and the Sandinistas, the SSA will no doubt assist this process as part of its campaign for an independent Scotland.

Paul Smith
Glasgow

Effective vote

It was with some concern that I read that Chris Jones, SLP candidate for Knowsley, was in favour of voting tactically for bourgeois election candidates who have a “good track record”.

I don’t think there can be any case for supporting any candidate who stands on the reactionary manifesto of New Labour, even less those who stand for the Scottish National Party or Plaid Cymru, whose programme is to divert workers from fighting their class enemies, and instead see government from England as the main reason for poverty, unemployment, etc.

I don’t advocate abstentionism in all cases where there are no socialist candidates. For instance, I will be voting for the Legalise Cannabis Party in spite of not being keen on single issue politics. But to allow lefties like Benn, Livingstone, Corbyn, etc to act as a fig leaf for Blair’s right wing agenda is not on. Even if your vote is ineffective under first-past-the-post, it is still worth voting for a party you believe in.

John Wake
Southampton

Mindless dogma

In the Weekly Worker (April l7), John Stone correctly points out that although the Labour Party is a bourgeois workers’ party, “the bourgeois element is becoming the predominant one”. Thus he is critical of Workers Power for viewing a vote for Labour not as a tactical issue, but as a strategic issue, because they see the “main task of the working class in this election is to kick the Tories out” in a struggle between the “party of the unions and the outright party of the capitalists”.

Therefore your readers will be somewhat surprised to see the front page of the May issue of Workers Struggle, the British journal of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International, which welcomes the election (and a vote for Labour) as “the chance to boot out a hated Tory government”, which has spent 18 years attacking the workers on behalf of the capitalists.

But what is so welcome about voting Labour to kick out the Tories? This sentiment is anti-Tory Labourism. The implication is that Labour is the lesser evil. As if New Labour does not represent the capitalists or will not attack the workers for 18 years if it gets the chance. Put another way, the logic of the position in Workers Struggle is that the main task of the working class in the election is to kick the Tories out in a battle between the party of the unions and the party of the capitalists - the pro-Labour position for which John Stone criticises Workers Power.

If there are any doubts that Workers Struggle has a strategic orientation towards Labour these are dispelled on page 3 of the May issue. The LCMRCI perspective is to “put class demands on Labour that will make it more difficult for a Blair government to ride roughshod over working class interests, shake out the trendy middle class New Labour members and split the base of the Labour Party from the rotten leadership”. This is passed off as a strategy of class independence.

This is not a strategy of class independence, but a strategy of class dependence on the Labour Party. It is the old dogmatic schema of help the Labour left fight the leadership, kick out the right and put pressure on Labour to moderate its anti-working class policies. The assumption is that revolutionary developments will pass through the Labour Party and that an inevitable stage of the building of a revolutionary party will be a left reformist current in the Labour Party. There is also a large dose of illusions in the Labour Party in this perspective.

The article rightly says that the SLP does not have a programme to bring about socialism. Therefore the best way to break workers’ illusions (socialist illusions) is to elect these socialists into office. True. But the writer then goes on to assert that “this applies to New Labour, however much it parades itself as the bosses’ friend”. But doesn’t parading as the bosses’ friend make a difference? Remember, if the bourgeois element now dominates the dialectical relationship between the two components of the bourgeois workers’ party, then surely the LCMRCI should practice what it preaches to WP?

The politics of a classical bourgeois workers’ party have not been unashamedly pro-capitalist, as the LCMRCI writer asserts. To maintain its working class base the programme and leadership of such a party has to contain false socialist rhetoric and promises to con the workers. To remain a workers’ party is to echo, in however deceitful, distorted and weak a form, the demands and needs of the organised workers.

In a polemic with the Weekly Worker (May 16 1996), Richard Brenner, a leader of WP, attempted to justify voting Labour by referring to WPs theses on reformism in Permanent Revolution No1 (once a journal of WP). Classical bourgeois workers’ parties were reformist, so the reason for voting Labour was to expose the Labour leaders’ unwillingness to carry out the wishes of the workers, “since the central political claim of the reformist leaders is that they can utilise bourgeois state power to satisfy the needs of the working class”. But this was mindless dogma, because satisfying the needs of the working class is not a claim made by Blair or New Labour.

We are back to the point made by John Stone as a stick to beat WP. The bourgeois element is becoming predominant. In other words, the Labour Party is being transformed into an open bourgeois party or returning to its liberal roots. New Labour is new in the sense that old Labourism is on its way out. We should give it a kick on its way, rather than cling to Labour with old dogma.

Dave Hume
South London