Letters

Despairing

I do not know how objective the rest of the Weekly Worker’s coverage is, but personally I am beginning to de­spair of ever being reported accurately in the paper.

For example, back in October 1996, the SLP organised a meeting in Camden, north London, with Arthur Scargill as the main speaker. During the discussion I asked Scargill what attitude the SLP would take towards those of us who wanted to remain in the Labour Party and fight against Blairism from within, in order to de­fend party democracy, the union link and so on. Would his party support the Labour left from outside, as the Morning Star does, I asked, or would it simply tell us to give up and leave the Labour Party?

If Scargill possessed an elementary sense of political tactics - which he does not - he would have replied along the following lines: ‘We have a com­mon enemy in the Blair leadership of the Labour Party, but we differ over how it can be best fought. The SLP will of course support the Labour left in its struggles against the right wing. We will certainly use our influence in the trade unions to support the un­ion link. In the course of these com­mon struggles, we believe that you will see that we are correct, and that is necessary to build a new socialist party.’

Of course, Scargill said nothing of the sort. He replied that it was un­principled for socialists like myself to remain members of a party that had renounced socialism, and that I should resign from the Labour Party immediately.

But how did the Weekly Worker re­port this exchange? You informed your readers that I had attacked Scargill for breaking from the Labour Party and had told him that he should have stayed to fight against Blair. Because you know this is the view that I hold, you obviously did not bother to listen to the point that I in fact made.

You did the same thing in your arti­cle on the February 4 launch meeting of the London Socialist Alliance. Re­porting my contribution to the discussion, Peter Manson writes: “He believes that the best way to work for a mass, socially significant break from Labourism is to continue to op­erate inside the Labour Party and ad­vocate a Labour vote.” Rather than outlining what I believe, would it not be better for Peter to report what I actually said?

The point I made at this meeting was much the same as the one I made to Scargill in 1996. I argued that a new political formation to the left of social democracy with any wide support usually arose, not as a result of indi­viduals and small groups coming to­gether, but from a crisis within an existing mass-based working class political organisation - which in Brit­ain means the Labour Party.

It was therefore necessary for the SA to take a serious attitude to La­bour, I argued. This required a sup­portive attitude towards the Labour left when struggles emerge within the Labour Party, a call for a Labour vote in seats where Alliance candidates are not standing and in general a rejection of the silly view put forward at the meeting by Socialist Party speakers that the Labour Party is now a bourgeois party through and through, virtually indistinguishable from the Tories or Liberal Democrats.

I claim no originality for these ar­guments. It is essentially the position which Trotsky adopted in response to the Independent Labour Party’s break from the Labour Party in 1932. While he was not in principle op­posed to the formation of a socialist party independent of Labour, Trotsky argued that a correct orientation to­wards the Labour Party, which is based on the trade unions and still holds the political allegiance of the majority of class conscious workers, is the necessary basis of an effective revolutionary strategy in the British workers’ movement.

Unfortunately it would seem that comrades from the Weekly Worker are not only opposed to applying such a strategy, they are incapable of even understanding it.

Bob Pitt
North London

General retreat

In a recent Weekly Worker (February 12 1998) there is a report on an 80-strong meeting of the London Social­ist Alliance which is greeted enthusiastically as an exciting and worthwhile advance for the revolu­tionary cause. Without a trace of irony the main speaker, a Labour member of the European parliament, is re­ported as describing a recent revolt by 47 Labour MPs as “a turning point in British history”.

Meanwhile speakers from the floor repeatedly stressed the need to work ‘within, alongside or at least not in opposition to certain elements’ defined as progressive within the La­bour Party. Overall the representation of, and orientation to, Labour - New and Old - was most heavily pronounced.

Some former members of the SLP spoke of “the failure of the Scargill project and the need to build the So­cialist Alliances”. As there was no rebuttal from the CPGB it can be as­sumed that this is a view which the CPGB now concurs.

When in 1996 the SLP was founded it was hailed by the CPGB as a “his­toric break with Labour”. The formal break with Labour was at the time correctly identified as its real signifi­cance. What for reasons of expedi­ency the CPGB chose to ignore was that without a clean break with Labourism the SLP was a vehicle built on blocks.

But who can argue now, when in ‘Party notes’ (Weekly Worker Febru­ary 12) Mark Fischer states that “what characterises the left is a fatal lack of ambition, a timid paralysis in the face of challenging Labour and bourgeois politics in general for the allegiance of our class”? Certainly an entirely accurate, if neither original nor con­sistent, analysis.

However. with a straight face Fischer then tells us that an LSA made up entirely of Labour Party loy­alists, ex-Labour Party loyalists, dis­gruntled SLP types, a few Socialist Party councillors and the odd Trot contain within them the necessary dynamic to organise “on a militant platform of independent working class politics” and from this platform “start to exercise hegemony over far wider sections of society than simply itself”.

Back in the summer of 1995, prior to the formation of the SLP, the idea of helping form an “independent and militant working class platform” was dismissed by the CPGB with wither­ing contempt in favour of an exclu­sive orientation to Labourism and the SLP. Now they are forced to reject the SLP which was at least anti-Labour, in favour of smooching in the LSA (in essence a pro-Labour lobby).

Properly assessed, the LSA devel­opment is the culmination of three years’ work by the CPGB. Each marked a political step backward: first, the walkout from discussions around the Independent Working Class As­sociation; followed by affiliation to the SLP; and now creating a forum for Labour groupies in the LSA. These backwards steps, within a gen­eral and continuing retreat by the entire left, it now attempts to palm off as a significant advance and poten­tial historic breakthrough.

However, like any sect, the general retreat does not appear to bother the CPGB one jot. This headlong retreat, which the CPGB can do nothing to stymie, can nevertheless even be a cause for rejoicing as long as it al­lows them to posture as its left wing. As Jack Conrad explains: “Where over the last decade one left and revo­lutionary group after another has lost self-belief and disintegrated ... our membership influence and the circulation of our press continues to grow. The future is bright, the future is red” (Weekly Worker February 12). In the face of such unfettered optimism to point out that the apparent growth of the CPGB fish is in direct proportion to the shrinking pond appears churl­ish.

Of course if the CPGB “ambition” ever stretches beyond party building then, sooner than Conrad imagines, they are going to be forced to leave the comfort of the lefty ghetto for real politics. When that transition is at­tempted - and, make no mistake, tran­sition it will have to be - recruits from the Labour diaspora will either balk or prove a serious handicap when it comes to the job of addressing the working class directly. For in funda­mental areas, the people they will be attempting to lead will already be far in advance of them.

A Shaw
Islington IWCA

Dialectical

In Alan Fox’s latest exchange with Tom Ball on racism and the state, he asks for examples of how the state uses racism.

I can give him one example of how racism is used by the government in the United States to keep workers di­vided. Recently, I was ‘privileged’ to view a videotape, prepared by the government’s Federal Aviation Ad­ministration, on terrorism and airport security. This videotape is used to ‘educate’ airport workers on what measures to take if one witnesses ‘suspicious activity’.

In the video, the ‘terrorists’ are played by two men who are made to look like they are from the Middle East. Time and again, it is made clear in this ‘educational’ video that the task of airport workers is to be on the lookout for ... Arabs and other peo­ple from the Middle East.

The FAA makes no bones about it. All people of Arab descent are to be suspected ‘terrorists’. This is a clear­-cut case of state-sponsored racism.

Further, there are implications for Alan Fox’s position on racism and the state. Police brutality and harassment of racial and national minorities, a re­ality on both sides of the Atlantic, is certainly not an ‘aberration’. On the contrary, it is a reality of the bour­geois state.

The bourgeoisie needs racism, sex­ism, national chauvinism, anti­-Semitism and homophobia to keep the workers divided in the face of mount­ing attacks on workers’ livelihoods. This is true not only during periods of economic crisis, but also during times of ‘prosperity’, when workers are more likely to mobilise to fight for better wages and benefits.

Perhaps comrade Alan should stop looking at the world empirically, and begin to view it in a dialectical and materialist manner.

Jim Paris
Detroit, USA