Letters

Praising the USSR

Danny Hammill’s article on the Southall October Revolution commemoration (‘Upholding the banner of Stalin’ Weekly Worker October 30) was particularly interesting, because I was at the same event. Here I am writing about attitudes towards socialist countries. This is a vast area. I hope I will be forgiven for the length of the letter.

Danny criticises the speaker from Red Youth at the rally for presenting an “ultra-idealised view of the Soviet Union”. Since Jack Conrad is on record as calling the Soviet Union a “national socialist dystopia”, anybody praising the USSR at all must cause Danny, and by extension the CPGB, some discomfort, for which ridicule is the only cure. It seems that a blanket condemnation of every socialist country, past or present, is the CPGB ideology of choice. After all, dystopias, the opposite of utopias, are not nice places. But it is a moot point whether this opinion makes the CPGB different from Trotskyism, Norman Stone or even the US state department.

In contrast to the thrust of Danny’s article, several of the speakers in Southall were eloquent on the theme of post-Soviet social and economic degradation, and I can vouch that everything they said on this was absolutely true - not opinion, but documented truth. Interestingly, Danny has nothing to say on this area in his article, because in the Weekly Worker it is Stalin who creates dystopias, not Yeltsin. It was one part of what the Southall speakers said that Danny cannot ridicule, so he simply passes over it in silence.

If people like Harpal Brar, Ella Rule and so on defend socialist countries of past and present so hotly, perhaps it is because these countries came under a constant propaganda barrage from forces whose devotion to capitalism and imperialism was and is undeniable. It is not a matter of the past being a “paradise”. But there was a time when communists defended socialist countries, even at the cost of their lives.

In 1942 an exhibition toured several European cities. It was called The Soviet paradise. Its exhibits depicted inhabitants of the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union as degraded brutes, the products of racial inferiority and ‘Bolshevism’. (A dystopia, anyone?) The purpose of The Soviet paradise was to attack communism, and when the exhibition, organised by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, was in Berlin, members of the underground Communist Party of Germany tried to set fire to it. They did some damage but were subsequently arrested, tortured and executed.

Logically, the CPGB and Danny would have to condemn these comrades for giving their lives in defence of the USSR’s reputation, for defending a “dystopia”. I have no such problem. The Soviet Union was not the worst a society could possibly be, even if Jack Conrad and Danny Hammill think it was.

Andrew MacKay
Reading

Race and class

Scapegoating has never been more evident for longer than in the case of the Roma (‘gypsies’). Even in countries with relatively few Romani groups and families, such as Britain (with an estimated Romani population of around 100,000), their different lifestyle has laid them open to oppressive treatment. While Britain has certainly seen harassment, including violent harassment, of Roma over centuries, there has as yet been no systematic attack that approaches the genocide of the European Roma holocaust under the Nazis, when an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 were killed in concentration and extermination camps. At first sterilised as ‘unworthy of human reproduction’ (fortpflanzungsunwürdig), they were ultimately annihilated as not worthy of living.

In the Czech Republic (estimated Roma population: over 250,000), recent television programmes have suggested Canada and Britain as places of asylum, delighting local racists, who were more than happy to try to get shot of their Roma. Mayors of some towns even offered to contribute funds to buying airline tickets for the Roma who wanted to leave. The mayor of Ostrava-Marianske Hory, Liana Janackova, told Mlada Fronta Dnes:

“We have two groups of people - gypsies and whites - that live together, but can’t and don’t want to. So why can’t one group take the first step toward finding a solution? I don’t think it’s racist. We just want to help the gypsies.”

The far-right Republican Party was less ambiguous about their pleasure with the situation. The deputy chairman of their parliamentary club, Jan Vik, said:

“We’re pleased that TV Nova, by presenting the sweet life of gypsies overseas on its Na vlastni oci programme, awakened in the blood of that ethnic group their wandering past, which unfortunately brought them to us so long ago” (Radio Praha).

This crisis came to a head in the summer. “The [Czech Republic] government shouldn’t be surprised at all that the Roma are fleeing the country. There are displays of racism here which are unbearable for them,” stated lawyer Klara Samkova-Vesela, a former activist in the Romani Civic Initiative, which has been concerned with the problems of the Roma for the last six years and which claims the government has yet to adopt any kind of solution to the Roma question. “[Prime minister] Klaus and his government are to blame for the current Roma crisis,” declared Samkova (Lidove Noviny August 13).

Here in Britain, it does the Roma and the working class no favours to pretend, as Alan Fox does (Weekly Worker November 6), that a racial element is absent in the actions of the Blair government, acting swiftly as it has to introduce changes in the vetting procedure for those claiming asylum. Their swiftness has had nothing to do with helping victims of racism and everything to do with pandering to anti-Roma racism in Britain and erecting obstacles in the path of the Roma trying to enter Britain. Already the National Front has seized on this issue, which is why anti-fascist groups are staging a counter-demonstration against its march this Saturday (November 15) in Dover.

Each and every Rom who comes to Dover as an asylum-seeker will not necessarily have suffered directly from the actions of racist Gadje (non-Rom) neighbours in the Czech Republic or Slovakia (where there is an estimated Roma population of 500,000). But that does not alter the fact that they suffer racist oppression as members of an ethnic minority. Their ethnic oppression produces problems for the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and affects their access to work opportunities. In that sense, their problems are economic, but to suggest that they are therefore only economic refugees, rather than fleeing well documented oppression, is wrong.

Roma do not have to be purely economically oppressed (ie, solely as workers) for the argument against border controls to be effective. Romani workers arriving at Dover have experienced the racism of the British state coupled with that state’s desire to vet those who may or may not contribute to the capitalist economy sufficiently. Dividing worker against worker on the basis of xenophobia, chauvinism and racism are, as we all know, excellent devices as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned. In the case of the Roma, however, they have it all. These are not ‘white’ muslim Bosnians, nor are they rich Indian businessmen. The Romani workers are portrayed and perceived as different as regards race, all the better to plumb the depths of racist feeling in Britain, latent or otherwise, against all Roma; and they are certainly poor, without capital or especial skills valuable to the bourgeois state.

It is all very well berating Socialist Worker and The Socialist for their various forms of leaning toward special pleading and emphasising that these are ‘genuine’ asylum seekers. Of course that approach panders to national chauvinism in the working class in Britain. But by trying to avoid that danger, another danger missed: that these Romani workers are indeed fleeing racist oppression and looking for asylum, in the widest sense, away from it. This does not negate the argument opposing border controls against the worker while capital has none, though it does present it in a different light. Primarily, the state always wants to let in or exclude whoever it pleases on its own terms. If it can cloak its real, economic reasons, utilising xenophobia and racism, it will of course do so. In the case of the Romani workers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia it is able to use not only xenophobia, but also racism, due to the attitudes toward Roma pre-existing in Britain. Campaigns against travellers (not all of whom are Roma, of course) manage to gain alarming degrees of support whenever they are launched in Britain, suggesting that anti-Roma racism is still respectable enough to be a winner for the bourgeoisie, even more than anti-African-Caribbean and anti-Asian racism.

The Romani workers’ position should not be argued as an exception to the stringent entry controls (for workers), the basis on which the SWP and the SP make their special pleas. But they are workers who are fleeing racist oppression and are suffering racist treatment at the British port of entry, in addition to falling foul of the stringent controls put in place by the British state to ensure difficulty for workers trying to come into the country. Unless someone is suggesting that there are Roma like Billy Butlin among those at Dover’s doorstep and whose wealth will thus easily gain them entry, ‘race’ and class must be taken into account.

Tom Ball
London

United front

In the light of the double ‘yes’ vote in Scotland and the ‘yes’ vote in Wales earlier this year, will the CPGB be seeking a kind of reconciliation/rapprochement with the Communist Party of Britain and other like groups (eg, the SLP and Democratic Left)?

Even though proportional representation will assist the Party, surely a united front against Labour, SNP, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives is needed? Why is there such animosity still between the two parties? After all, you are still working in the interests of the same people - the proletariat.

Mark Miles
West Lothian