Letters

No credit

While respecting Don Preston’s right (nay, duty to his writing vocation) to say just about anything provided it is conditional to his assessment of “these specific conditions” - which I presume to be a reference to the current stage of the resolution of the capital-labour contradiction. Nonetheless, his piece ‘Saying the unsayable’ (Weekly Worker October 22) brought no credit to the Weekly Worker’s ‘Around the left’ column - rather an image of a ‘weakened worker’ around the bend was created.

Institutionalised racism does exist in the UK police forces. Even Manchester’s police chief acknowledges what UK minorities have been complaining about for years is a problem. Only a middle class, and probably white plonker who likes to flash his Latin (“reductio ad absurdum” - I bet Workers Hammer are really pissed off to be accused of that by Preston’s piece) could be so confused about the important issues covered in ‘Saying the unsayable’.

For instance, the mainstream press does coalesce with the left press on issues other than the Stephen Lawrence case. Why else did the relaunch of Marxism Today (which the Morning Star characterised as the group that took the Marx out of Marxism and put the ‘rev’ in revisionism) get so much coverage in the mainstream media? If there is an opportunity to dilute communist certainty then the mainstream media apply the maxim that Preston rightly attached to police who “use all and any means”.

Naturally, one is suspicious of the Daily Mail, but no doubt they get behind other popular issues such as nurses’ pay and conditions, and the Mail putting their legal budget up against racist thugs is to be welcomed surely as some indicator of perceived common decency amongst its target market. The Weekly Worker seeking to be the only left paper posing an argument counter to the Lawrence family point of view cannot in anyway be commendable.

Preston has difficulty accepting that institutionalised racism could be possible, probably because he has not developed a sufficient understanding of racism’s true nature - in particular, the part racism plays in the unconscious formation of all national identities. For instance, Preston is reassured by the implausibility of the existence of a “racist cabal” comprising such diverse constituents as the “boys and girls in blue” (Preston’s words), judges and the British National Party. It is well known that judges and cops have worked and do work together to pervert the course of justice, and if Preston cannot accept this then it is time for him to devote his writing vocation exclusively to explicit fiction.

However, it is Preston’s fantasy that somehow the BNP have to be part of the racist cabal which demonstrates the limitations of his argument. Preston is right in one sense - the only thing one could imagine a judge and a BNP bonehead could possibly have in common is perhaps use of the same prostitute’s service. Nazis are not known for their intelligence. Indeed a quick review of their culture - hate, alcohol abuse, mythology, the occult, violence, frenzied white power music, drug abuse and internecine murder - reveals the UK far right as composed of easily led morons who are clearly being tactically manipulated by more powerful agencies.

Preston’s concept that the “official ideology of the state” (as apparently received by the readership of The Guardian and the Daily Mail) is anti-racist, and that because of this communists should treat issues around anti-racism with some circumspection, is totally laughable. Such an idea seems to play upon the media creation that is instinctively antipathetic towards political correctness. Why else should one take an anti-anti-racist position unless one is actually a racist oneself - and therefore not a communist. There is little evidence of political correctness running rampant in police forces, who typically have themselves unrepresentative racial mixes which disadvantages access to well paid public service jobs for minorities inclined to pursue a career in the police.

The idea that “the left as a whole - as a matter of theoretical and political urgency” needs to grasp the “truth” that “racism, like anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, no longer serves the interests of the state” - or that rather than institutionalised racism “the greater danger comes from institutionalised anti-racism” - could only come from someone who looks to the capitalist media for succour.

Consequently, Preston is “missing the point spectacularly”.

Julian Hawthorne
Manchester

New twists

The monthly paper of the Workers Power group now has a new look. It says that this reflects merely a change in style. As we have claimed before, just as New Labour used to be a reformist bourgeois workers’ party, so Keith Harvey’s New League for a Revolutionary Communist International/WP has been transformed from a healthy revolutionary organisation into an erratic, centrist and closed sect. In a way, this new Workers Power expresses WP’s deep deformation.

WP introduced its new-look paper with the following promise: “We will make space for contributions from those in the labour movement and on the left who do not agree with us.” However, in that issue and the following one there is not a single paragraph given to any critical leftwinger.

In the pages of the Weekly Worker there have been numerous exchanges about WP’s U-turns. Are WP going to allow such critiques to also appear in Workers Power? They have never mentioned the existence of these polemics in their press.

WP members used to go to many meetings in order to criticise the positions of other left groups. Now it is the other way round. They do not go anywhere and no time is allocated for critical speeches in the few public meetings they hold.

Workers Power does not even have a letters page. They simply are not interesting in inviting their readers to comment and criticise. They are meant to be passive spectators who have to be told the party line - a line elaborated behind closed doors by a handful of ‘revolutionaries’. The paper claims that “WP is the number one leftwing publication for serious analysis and debate, as well as the only really revolutionary paper in Britain”. 

If they are genuinely serious about analysis they need to answer many things which we and many others have been asking them for years. Why does WP always vote for the Blairites against the left? Why did it do entryist work in the SLP while refusing to support it electorally? Why did it initially support an all-UK perspective and reject demands for Scottish autonomy, and then later - when most Scottish workers wanted devolution - vote ‘yes’ in the referendum? Why, at the same time, was it against any degree of autonomy for Wales? How on earth can it say that in the last decade the world is simultaneously entering a ‘revolutionary period’ and a ‘counterrevolutionary situation’? Why does WP now say that the creation of (the workers’) states in Eastern Europe and Asia actually meant the reinforcement of the bourgeois state, even though it described most of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, as moribund workers’ states?

WP will never answer. It thinks that a group of 50 people who have never led any mass strike or demonstration is the only revolutionary force in Britain. The WP leadership does not want to listen to other groups’ arguments or engage in serious united front activity. It only want fronts it can control. It does not even allow tendencies inside its own ranks.

Tragically, the organisation that was co-founded by Dave Hughes and the South American Poder Obrero is now becoming an irrelevant and arrogant cult.

John Stone
LCMRCI

Sectarian murder

The callous sectarian murder by loyalists of Stephen Service in the Alliance area of North Belfast is purely sectarian and is to be deplored by all right-thinking people. The murder of yet another nationalist will come as no surprise to the nationalist community in the north of the city, whose homes have been coming under persistent attack in recent months.

The Irish Republican Socialist Party are calling on the RUC to release the forensic history of the weapon used in the murder. It is important that the wider community are told if those who killed Stephen Service at night are masquerading as peacemakers during the day at Stormont. The speculation that the killers are a splinter loyalist group will not wash with nationalists. The history of violent loyalism shows that mainstream loyalism has a pattern of using cover names.

IRSP
Belfast

A statement from Death Row

Once again, Pennsylvania’s highest court has shown us the best justice that money can buy. Ignoring right, reason, their own precedent, and fundamental justice, they have returned to the stranglehold of death.  In their echoes of the tortured logic of Judge Albert Sabo, they have reflected a striking fidelity to the DA’s office.  If it is fair to have a tribunal who are in part admittedly paid by the FOP-and at least one justice who can double as DA one day and a judge the next in the same case—then fairness is just as empty a word as “justice.”  To paraphrase Judge Sabo, it is “just an emotional feeling.”

In recent months the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld death sentences in cases where an impartial reading of transcripts or pleadings would make an honest affirmation all but impossible. They have ignored all evidence of innocence, overlooked clear instances of jury taint, and cast a dead eye on defence attorneys’ ineffectiveness.  What they have done in my case is par for the course.  This is a political decision, paid for by the FOP on the eve of the election. It is a Mischief Night gift from a court that has a talent for the macabre.

I am sorry that this court did not rule on the right side of history.  But I am not surprised.  Every time our nation has come to a fork in the road with regard to race, it has chosen to take the path of compromise and betrayal.  On October 29 1998, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court committed a collective crime: it damned due process, strangled the fair trial, and raped justice.

Even after this legal legerdemain I remain innocent.  A court cannot make an innocent man guilty.  Any ruling founded on injustice is not justice. The righteous fight for life, liberty, and for justice can only continue.

Note: The Pennsylvania state supreme court, after taking 13 months to deliberate, has just handed down a 71-page decision, denying Mumia’s appeal for a new trial. The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, has said that once his appeal was completed, he would sign a death warrant immediately. Clearly his life is now in immediate danger.

Mumia Abu-Jamal
Pennsylvania, USA