Letters

Revolutionary method

As people in Scotland go to the polls, it is impossible to leave Dave Craig’s article in the Weekly Worker (September 4) unanswered.

Dave Craig is a regular contributor to the Weekly Worker and, as I understood it, previously also a regular reader. He has, I know, been involved in many CPGB-organised discussions around the referendum campaign and the Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination’s call for an active boycott.

Therefore his article leaves me, and CPGB comrades I have spoken to while I have been up in Scotland, in utter disbelief.

Has Dave Craig missed the whole point of the active boycott call from the very beginning, or is this some curious way to try and claim a base of support for the CGSD that actually does not exist?

Perhaps a little of both. Certainly Craig’s rather abstract approach to politics, and to the boycott campaign in particular, has been evident in previous articles. He is often so interested in categorising phenomena that he fails to see them in movement, or their potential for change if acted upon. But the peculiar approach he takes this time takes him into even more absurd depths.

Let us be clear. In no way has the CGSD “gone out to win support for abstention”. Though Craig is right in a certain sense to say that “abstention is a kind of vote ... of no confidence in what is on offer”, this is not necessarily and certainly not a wholly positive phenomenon. In Scotland those that abstain may be very cynical about Scotland Forward and the sop parliament on offer, but unless that cynicism is developed into positive action it can be a very negative force.

A passive abstention will in all likelihood mean that Blair will achieve the mandate he wants in order to inflict a sop on the Scottish people and diffuse for the moment the radical momentum for change that had begun to build up. Cynicism in Scotland can also be cohered around a reactionary nationalist trajectory, if revolutionaries fail to infuse the sense of a democratic deficit in Scotland with a working class agenda that sees people throughout the UK state taking the struggle for democracy into their own hands.

No, Dave, we will not be “claiming the abstention votes for the left”. Abstention is only evidence of the failure, or at least the limited success, of the boycott campaign. There is no doubt that the campaign has had an impact, not least on Scottish Militant Labour, but also amongst layers of the working class in Scotland as a whole through our media interventions and the thousands of leaflets given out and discussions had. We have planted the seed of an alternative way to fight. Nevertheless, we have failed to actually turn that propaganda into action on the streets.

Neither are we in the business of painting “those votes red”. One criticism that Phil Stott of Scottish Militant Labour threw at us at Communist University ’97, a debate Dave attended, was that we would not be able to measure our success. Yes, we would, was the reply - if people came out onto the streets, not by counting the abstentions. We were very sober about our own ability to achieve this, but nevertheless the propaganda war that we waged around the question was essential in developing and debating the revolutionary method. Clearly this is a discussion we need to continue with Dave Craig as well as those in the Scottish Socialist Alliance.

Linda Addison
London

Nazis confronted

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the death of Rudolf Hess, Nazis from all over Germany and Europe decided to centre their main demonstration in Roskilde, Denmark.

German law outlaws any public activity with Nazi symbols. So the Hitlerites used mobile phones and the internet to organise their action in neighbouring Denmark, in a city which is only one hour from the German border. The minister of justice (Franz Jensen) gave authorisation for a Nazi demonstration in Roskilde, protected by around 800 police.

On Saturday August 16 there was a clash between the racists and anti-racists, consisting of the left, refugees and immigrants from the ‘third world’ and ordinary working people. Before the demonstration the police arrested around 25 anti-racists under the pretext of avoiding violence. In fact, they were allowing the scum who massacred millions of Slavs, Scandinavians, Jews, gypsies and other people to rally in favour of another holocaust and violence against non-Aryans.

When the Nazis from central Europe, Britain, France, Norway and Sweden began to march, the anti-racists attacked. When the police fired tear gas, they retaliated with stones.

The racist leader Jonny Hansen has had death threats from the Turkish anti-fascist community and the police arrested a group of immigrants who were found with a gun.

The only way to smash the Nazis is through mobilising workers, youth and immigrants. Through mass, revolutionary direct action on the streets this scum can be destroyed. We should not appeal to the bourgeois state and its police, which, far from wanting to eliminate fascism, prefers to keep it in incubation, to control it, ready for use against immigrants and the left.

We need an anti-fascist united front. Every time the Nazis try to make a tour de force internationally,the left must respond with international mass direct action.

Alberto
LCMRCI Denmark

Animal rights fascists

I have a question about a Weekly Worker article of July 24. Tom Ball wrote about the involvement of fascists in the “animal rights scene”. Which sources (which issues of Searchlight, other sources) have you used? Which fascist organisations are involved in animal rights? Are these organisations connected to eco-fascist groups in Germany (the Unabhängige Ökologen Deutschlands/UÖD, linked to the international Planet Drum Foundation, for example) and who are their partners in the British “animal rights scene”?

In Germany, animal rights activists are a serious threat for parts of the left (mostly for spontaneists, anarchists, feminists) and are recruiting a lot of rebellious (mostly very young, middle class) people. Most of them are not fascists or reactionaries (in the traditional meaning of the words), but their naivety about their own theories is dangerous. Nearly all of them share a latent (sometimes very strong) misanthropism and elements of Malthusianism: they advocate biocentrism and anti-speciesism - ideologies which are essentially anti-humanist and in diametrical contradiction to Marxism (and every other leftist political current which struggles for human emancipation). Furthermore, some of them have links with ‘earth-liberation’ groups (Earth First, for example), ‘deep ecologists’, bioregionalists and eco-fascists of the UÖD.

Ole Wiedenmann
Germany

Awful family

Thank you for a thoughtful and insightful article (‘Death of a troublesome princess’ Weekly Worker September 4). Diana Spencer was a distant relative of mine and was someone I had always been interested in. I think your description of what she had to go through with ‘the firm’ was right on target.

However, I must say that I do not think the last word has yet been said on the conspiracy idea. Not one to buy into conspiracy theories as a regular rule, this one really seems to hold water. The wonderful advantage of this case is that the Al Fayed family probably has more money than the royals and may be able to get to the bottom of all this in spite of their opposition. The testimony of the one survivor will be critical before we close the door on this theory.

Fortunate also is the pledge of the Earl Spencer, speaking as part of Diana’s ‘blood’ relatives, to make sure that Diana’s unfortunate children continue to be cared for in a manner that she would approve of - ie, normal, as opposed to royal. Otherwise, they would be at the mercy of that awful ‘other’ family.

Laura Houghton
Salt Lake City, USA

Locked together

I was interested to read comments in Open Polemic by comrade Bob Smith. Bob had been following the polemics between myself on the one hand and the CPGB’s Martin Blum and Mark Fischer over rapprochement. In essence the debate was between programmatic rapprochement and the ‘anybody can join today’ theory of organisational rapprochement.

In essence we have the difference between anarchism and democracy. (Our hostility to programmatic anarchy and our support for programmatic democracy goes back to our struggle against the SWP Central Committtee). Open Polemic seems to have this same anarchistic conception of rapprochement and have come up with a bureaucratic solution whereby a committee will exercise ‘fair play’ over the length of the ensuing polemics. OP therefore has the opposite approach to the RDG. Bob Smith acknowledges this, saying that “when Dave Craig of the RDG writes that OP and the RDG are polar opposites in the strategy for communist rapprochement, he is, of course correct”.

 Not surprisingly Bob Smith supports Martin and Mark in this article, entitled ‘Bob Smith lines up behind the Leninists’. He says: “It grieves me greatly that, in the current impasse between the self-proclaimed Leninists of the now defunct CPGB and the so-called RDG (external faction of the SWP), I must come out firmly on the side of the Leninists.” He then goes on to fire many shots against the CPGB, in order to explain why he hates siding with them. The ‘Leninists’, he says, “are correct, in my opinion, to insist to the RDG that programmatic agreement is not the basis for communist rapprochement.” He concludes by asking where this leaves OP and the Leninists? He says quite logically, from the aforementioned views on rapprochement, that despite all the hostility that has come between them, “our destinies are locked together”.

Whilst Bob’s article is logically correct, in the rapprochement ‘hall of mirrors’ nothing is quite what it seems. No sooner was Bob’s ink dry than we see the publication of the joint ‘Thesis on rapprochement’ (Weekly Worker August 7) agreed between the CPGB (PCC) and the RDG (OC). This sheds a new light on the whole situation. Their thesis argues that at the lowest level, coming together, working together and debating does not require programmatic agreement. But higher levels of rapprochement, with multi-faction tendencies or the Party itself, does require a programmatic basis.

Bob ends by saying, “Perhaps it will take an inspired third party to break the deadlock” (between OP and the CPGB). I hope that Bob Smith and OP will examine the new thesis and consider their attitude towards it.

Dave Craig
RDG (Faction of the SWP)