Letters

Bureaucratic crap

Simon Harvey’s article on the cancellation of the conference of the Wales ‘region’ of the Socialist Labour Party (Weekly Worker August 7) was inaccurate in a number of respects. This letter will correct the record and add some further information with regard to this direct attack on the democratic rights of the members of the SLP.

In a letter to Dave Proctor our general secretary and erstwhile president instructs him to cancel the conference and not to convene a meeting of the Regional Executive Committee. This was as a result of a letter sent by myself to Proctor at the time of his convening of the conference. This letter so concerned Scargill that in addition to cancelling our conference he has decided to investigate the entire SLP in Wales.

At this point I must explain the contents of the terrible missive. In the first instance it demanded the convening of the REC and to set its agenda - such being its rights and privilege under the much vaunted constitution. Secondly, I stated that it was my opinion that the constitution has no moral authority or democratic mandate.

Scargill singles out my opinion of the constitution as a pretext to cancel our conference and in doing so violates, yet again, his own oh-so precious document. My views on the bureaucratic organisation of the SLP have often been expressed both publicly and in previous correspondence with Scargill. The truth is that at no cost could the Wales region of the SLP be allowed to fall into the hands of democrats.

It is clear Scargill gives not a damn for the constitution but desires a party of like-minded clones. His early training in her majesty’s Stalinist Party, the one and only CPGB, returns to haunt him like a syphilitic infection. But it is not a shared admiration for the Stalinist variant of state capitalism that unites Scargill with figures as diverse as Harpal Brar, Royston Bull and Patrick Sikorski. Rather it is a shared belief in the leading role of ‘left’ trade union bureaucrats and a corresponding distrust of the rank and file. This can be seen in the SLP and the conduct of recent disputes involving SLP leaders.

Curiously, Proctor, the author of a chauvinist article on Wales in Socialist News, is now reported to have come out for a ‘yes’ vote in the upcoming referendum. Like Pavlov’s dog, Proctor runs to his master’s heels like a craven cur at a saltick, his only slogan for class struggle being ‘Follow my leader, right or wrong’.

And it is his leader who usurps the rights of the Wales conference and declares in Socialist News that the SLP will fight every seat in a Welsh assembly. To dispense with democracy it would seem Scargill now has no need for arithmetic. The SLP in Wales has fewer activists than the projected assembly will have seats.

Yet despite all the bureaucratic crap placed in our path, Cardiff SLP will continue to pursue the class struggle, both within the SLP and without. Our next foray will be into the elected arena when we stand comrade Terry Burns in a council by-election. With regard to the struggle within the SLP we will be standing for the National Executive as democrats.

Mike Pearn
Penarth

English values

Don Preston’s sneering anti-Welsh remarks is last week’s paper (Weekly Worker August 28) are a reminder of how ‘international’ socialists have a nasty habit of echoing the imperialist attitudes of their masters.

He refers to the Welsh communist, WJ Rees: “His claim to fame, apparently, is to have translated The communist manifesto into the Welsh from the original German.”

Obviously this translation was a total waste of time in the eyes of our metropolitan comrade, who believes the Welsh should be content with an English version. He then reminds us that “communists actively look forward to the disappearance of national characteristics” (original emphasis).

This abstract internationalist mentality mirrors the British empire’s attempts to impose the English language, English culture and English values on colonised peoples. In many cases the metropolitan ruling class promoted a native ruling class to do its dirty work.

It seems that the ruling class has another group of cultural supporters among sections of the left, who want national characteristics extinguished and - by default - one ‘internationalist’ culture to supersede them. And guess which language would be used to communicate that culture.

The Welsh communists who were so instrumental in forming the CP had no problem with Welsh self-determination, Welsh culture and the Welsh language. They actively promoted all these things - why are you so frightened by these national characteristics?

Mike Davies
Wrecsam

Form of abuse

Most of my article in last week’s Weekly Worker (August 28) was written on August 3 before discussion of the propriety of ‘national socialism’ and Mark Fischer’s defence of this sobriquet on August 15.

I am saddened that Mark chooses to defend this. I am quite happy with a political attack on socialist-nationalists; ‘national socialist’ however is a term of abuse. Mark agrees, but claims Lenin’s attacks on the Mensheviks as justification. This is a very slippery slope. Even if Lenin were justified in the particular circumstances of a split to abuse his opponents, the CPGB and SML are both in the SSA and Mark claims to be in 80% agreement with them. So Lenin says we should abuse our comrades and fellow party activists in order to make them reflect - I think not.

Jack Conrad should apologise for his infantile behaviour.

Gordon Morgan
Glasgow

Highly critical

A belated few lines on your coverage of the Socialist Party’s Joe Higgins’ election to the Dail in June. A critical vote was correct for him but the ‘critical’ bit is very important. It would also have been correct to call for critical votes for all working class candidates: the SWP, Workers Party (on the basis of radical campaigning), Democratic Left (DL) and Labour Party (LP) (linked to the trade unions). The order of preference with Ireland’s single transferable, multi-seat constituencies, depending on who is standing, should be SP, SWP, Workers Party, LP and DL. The transferable vote dispenses with the argument of wasted votes. It would not have been correct to call for a Sinn Fein vote because of their anti-working class policies in the south.

Joe Higgins did not campaign in defence of travellers’ rights, refugees’ rights, free abortion, troops out of the north, etc, etc. He stood as a populist community activist rather than as a Trotskyist. He supports the Gardai and vigilante bigots against drug dealers. This fosters dangerous illusions in the impartiality of the state forces and in the rightwing bigots. The Irish Militant and Sinn Fein’s paper, An Phoblacht, conspicuously failed to condemn the brutal vigilante murder of seven-stone Aids victim Jose Dwyer in Dolphins Barn in Dublin on May 14 last year. Sinn Fein’s Martin Ferris, who just failed to get elected in Kerry North, is seen as linked to an IRA-front, anti-drugs vigilante group. It is ironic the anti-republican SP and Sinn Fein share identical reactionary positions on drugs. It is also ironic now to see both outstripped on the left by the calls for the decriminalisation of all drugs by the not very left British Labour Party backbenchers.

The manifesto called for ‘no’ to another referendum on abortion and for legislation (to be introduced) to give effect to the supreme court ruling on the X case. The furthest it would go in opposing the pro-life bigots was this demand, which came down to asking that women be allowed to have an abortion (in England!) only if they can prove their lives are in danger - eg, from suicide, as in the X case.

The supreme court made this confusing judgement under the pressure of an outraged mass movement. It reversed the fascistic ruling of the high court.  The high court had forbidden the 14-year old rape victim (X) from leaving the state to have an abortion. How could the supreme court ruling be enacted in law? How could pregnant women prove to bigoted judges they were serious about suicide?

A critical vote indeed, and no illusions that the SP represents any type of socialist alternative to the LP or the DL.

Gerry Downing
London

Reforms not wanted

Ostensibly about the referendum on a Scottish parliament, Mary Ward’s article (‘Workers must lead’ Weekly Worker August 14) was one of the most incisive and effective critiques of reformism as an approach to socialism I have seen for some time. I was however surprised by her comment that revolutionaries want to see reforms, but that what marks them out from reformists is how they obtain them. It is not consistent with her later description of what the revolutionary movement would tell the capitalist class to do with their reforms.

Mary is entirely correct to say that by advocating/threatening socialist revolution, we are likely to obtain reforms from a capitalist class trying to buy off and divert the socialist movement. She might have added that reforms obtained by such a method are likely to be much greater than those won by reformists working within the confines of the present system. Even in obtaining reforms, the revolutionary method is more successful than the reformist one.

But this is not the same as saying that concessions offered by a frightened capitalist class should actually be wanted or welcomed by socialists.  We don’t want a reformed or ameliorated capitalism because such a capitalism would work just as much in the interests of the capitalists as an unreformed capitalism. That is why we are socialists and want the entire system replaced by socialism. We don’t want a larger slice of the cake; we want to take over the bakery.

I may have misinterpreted Mary, but her comment seems linked with the CPGB’s advocacy of reforms in its recent Election Manifesto. I might accept that that the CPGB does not really believe such reforms are achievable under capitalism, but in reality how does this approach differ from the reformism so brilliantly demolished in Mary’s article? Advocating socialist revolution is not an extension of advocating reforms to capitalism, but a complete opposite.

Advocating reforms to capitalism does nothing to dispel illusions in either the desirability or possibility of reforming capitalism in the interests of the working class.  A working class with illusions is more likely to say ‘thank you’ to concessions from our enemies than the reply Mary would give. The only way to dispel such illusions and to build up the self-confident class - strong enough not only to tell the capitalist class to go to hell, but to actually send them there - is to start from what our class actually needs and to argue in a consistent, logical and uncompromising way for socialism.

Every breath used to advocate reforms is one denied for putting the case for socialism. Our class needs capitalism to be replaced by socialism and we cannot afford for this change to be delayed much longer.

Andrew Northall
Kettering