Letters

No platitude

Comrade Danny Hammill (Letters Weekly Worker 223) clearly lives in a very different world from me. For Danny, everyone who takes drugs - legal or illegal - does so in order to “enhance pleasure”, and the only blight on the horizon is the nasty puritans who want to impose ‘harm reduction’ strategies on this aspect of “human liberation”.

Sadly, Danny, the reality of my world is one where women are hooked on prescribed tranquillisers to get through the drudgery of their daily lives, where children are “choosing” to inject themselves with heroin and where vicious gangsters are making multi-million pound profit. This is not to mention the fortunes made by drug companies and the tobacco and alcohol industries. For many working class people drug-taking does not make their lives “a hell of a lot easier”, as Danny suggests, but does in fact “fuck them up”. Of course, there are people who use drugs recreationally and relatively safely, but there are also those who are dependent on drugs. Both groups are entitled to be aware of harm reduction strategies.

Danny seeks to characterise my attitude as one of “dull sobriety”. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am in favour of the legalisation of all drugs, but I certainly do not hold with Danny’s libertarian and somewhat hedonistic approach to the subject. I recognise there are potential dangers and risks.

I believe in informed choice - that is what harm reduction means; having detailed knowledge about the substance we are taking, knowing the likely effects, what to do if it goes wrong. Sorry if all this sounds boring and didactic to Danny and his friends, who either have all this information or do not feel they need it.

Danny also quotes me out of context. He says: “Get them off drugs and they will become ‘good citizens’ or, as comrade Ward puts it, “function as part of their communities”. I used this as an argument for prescribing heroin, not as a reason for stopping drug taking.

Most of us take drugs, in one form or another. Sometimes for pleasure, sometimes to keep us alive and sometimes because we are feeling self-destructive. I make no apology for being an advocate of harm reduction strategies and fail to see why Danny finds this so repugnant. We must expose the bourgeois prohibitionists for the hypocrites they are and show the reasons why their policies are wrong. But we must not present our attitude to the working class as one of ‘take everything and anything. Danny, communist morality is not just a platitude.

Mary Ward
Dundee

Halt on debate

Readers may be curious about the absence of Linda Addison from the polemical stage in the Weekly Worker. After all over the past few months and a number of articles and now a letter several side swipes and obscure references to peculiar views attributed to Linda Addison have been penned by Jack Conrad.

Here are few examples. On October 23 comrade Conrad refers to a “very confused comrade Addison”. Linda Addison is perhaps also one of those “veering towards sectarianism” in that issue. In a meeting Linda was wrongly attributed with the view that the “working class has been smashed”, which reappears attributed to an unnamed minority in the same issue. Conrad continues with a bold and unsubstantiated assertion of “Linda Addison’s shameful call for a retreat from political practice and engagement” on December 4. Again Addison “… does not seem to grasp that the boycott campaign was about practical politics. Almost like an anarchist, it was for her a moral posture designed to educate the masses in the ‘method’ they need”. The latest of course is “comrade Addison’s mish-mash of ineffectual bile, dour pessimism and puerile inaccuracy ... the comrade arrived at right liquidationism not as a result of theory, but due to a lack of theory” (January 22).

My replies to just some of these misrepresentations were not published because they were characterised as “boring and technical” by the editor. In fact the PCC had taken a decision to pursue internally the arguments I first raised on October 3 in the Weekly Worker, since they were not considered immediately relevant or readable by a broader readership. Conrad has in fact quoted in the Weekly Worker of November 13 from an internal document which I subsequently wrote.

The problem with Jack Conrad’s method of attack in this debate, particularly his last, is that it effectively halts any political debate. If your opponent is replied to simply with a string of accusations on her ability to debate at all, how can the debate be progressed? The debate is written off as irrelevant, as it results from a “lack of theory”, is “complete garbage” or “ineffectual bile”. It is perhaps a little ironic that my original argument was addressed to the problem of developing all our comrades more fully as self-activating “communist theoreticians”.

Linda Addison
London

Misrepresented

I feel my position on the SLP has been misrepresented in Alan McArthur’s recent report on the SLP’s 2nd congress in Workers’ Liberty (‘SLP severely injured’, January 1998). He cites an article of mine as a poor example of the response of some of the left to the farce which the congress undoubtedly was.

Comrade McArthur quotes my remark in the December 18 post-conference edition of the Weekly Worker: “If the class was combative, if we were moving forward, the SLP would be swamped by workers who would simply not put up with the bureaucratic shenanigans of the leadership.” He then argues: “Even if this were not so very unlikely, to attempt to channel the upsurge in working class activity into a neo-Stalinist sect would be a grave mistake for socialists.”

Unfortunately, comrade McArthur failed to quote the very next sentence I wrote: “Alternatively, the SLP would be completely ignored, as workers moved directly towards revolutionary politics” (Weekly Worker December 18).

The last thing I was doing was positing the SLP as some necessary step for an emerging class movement to go through. I was hypothetically noting that if the class had been combative at the time of the SLP’s formation, the SLP would have either been ignored or been a completely different beast from what it is today.

My article was an attempt to stop the SLP left splintering into 57 different directions. It was a polemic against abstract moralism, against wishful thinking, not a prescription for an as yet non-existent militant mass movement. Given an upsurge in working class activity, I will be doing my upmost to channel such a movement into a Communist Party and away from the politics of “neo-Stalinist sects”.

However, in the absence of anything else, I argued that, despite himself, “Scargill is relatively well positioned” and that the crisis of the SLP “is one of the few bridges which exists between the crisis of Labourism and the struggle for a Communist Party”.

What is comrade McArthur’s panacea, but a feeble and decidedly abstract call for a “Labour Representation Committee”. Our struggle is for a Communist Party, but we are not sectarians. Were such a Labour Representation Committee to become a reality, it would be beholden on revolutionaries to positively engage with such a process. But so far, it remains the idle fancy of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

It is a reflection of the parlous state of our movement that it only produces shabby outfits like the SLP. However, apart from the Socialist Alliances and our own campaign for communist rapprochement, it is all there is by way of any process for party

Martin Blum
London

Academic?

Eddie Ford’s look at the recent reincarnation of the Revolutionary Communist Party as media stars on the Channel Four series Against Nature (Weekly Worker January 8) made me wonder what has happened to this organisation. I’ve been told that the party still exists. Yet the Against Nature producer, Martin Durkin, who’s not known as an RCP member or supporter, said in the Guardian on December 20 1997 that it had been dissolved over a year before. Does he know something we don’t?

Whilst Against Nature did aim a few nice barbs at the greens, there was nothing in those programmes that could not have been said by an intelligent spokesman for capitalism. To put it another way, the RCP’s break into the big time was at the expense of any radical politics. Of course, the greens cannot tolerate any criticism of their holy ideas: hence their annoyance. But merely to pose, as Against Nature did, undifferentiated ‘progress’, without looking at the issue of the control of industrialisation, will not break the ideological stranglehold of greenery.

As for LM (née Living Marxism), regular readers will have noticed how narrow its focus has become over the last couple of years. Increasingly obsessed with countering moral panics and heaving brickbats at the liberal media, whole hordes of important global events have escaped its eye. Only if events can be wedged into the sphere of the party’s current theoretical hobbyhorse, the “culture of low expectations”, will they be covered. One gets the impression of a steady disengagement from anything resembling leftwing politics.

A droll lesson, no doubt unintended, was drawn in last November’s LM. In its libel case against LM, over what the journal considered was misleading reportage on the war in former Yugoslavia, ITN charged it with having the “improper motive” of “fuelling its campaign of pro-Serbian propaganda … thereby hoping to further the cause of revolutionary communism and/or Marxist ideology”. This, says LM, is a “caricature” of the magazine’s politics. I would have thought that being accused of furthering “the cause of revolutionary communism and/or Marxist ideology” was not merely a “caricature” of its politics, but constituted a prima facie case of libel.

The essence of the RCP’s crisis is that it came to see the disorientation of the labour movement as the demise of the working class as a potentially revolutionary force, the agency of social transformation. The RCP is in danger of going down some very bizarre political thoroughfares. There is the possibility that the combination of its rejection of class politics - in other words, the repudiation of the revolutionary potential of the working class - and its obsession with censorship and the intrusion of the state into people’s personal lives could lead to adherents of the group (if not the group itself) veering wildly towards a reactionary libertarian standpoint. Stripped of any class criterion, parts of LM are starting to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to rightwing libertarianism, that bolt-hole for the ultimate petty bourgeois hedonist.

Put this way, the question of ‘does the party still exist?’ seems pretty academic.

Dave Walker
New Interventions