Letters

Check your facts

Don Preston did not ask the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty for our view about our relations with Socialist Outlook inside the Welfare State Network before writing ‘Economists fall out’ (Weekly Worker February 11). Instead he used the opportunity to have a cynical sneer about Outlook in the first place, but also about the AWL.

In the case of the AWL he makes some unsubstantiated assumptions about how we have behaved in the WSN. Let me put some things on the record. I write both as an AWL member and as an editor of Action.

1. For over four years the WSN has been a collaborative effort of different groups, campaigns and individuals. That is a fairly unique experience on the British left.

2. Outlook have never been excluded from the campaign or from the campaign’s paper Action.

3. Outlook’s viewpoint has never been censored. From the point of view of developing political discussion and trying to shape a healthier left we felt, and still feel, that is a good thing to have political pluralism in the WSN’s paper. As Action did, and Action for Solidarity will continue to do, we publish the views of Socialist Outlook on different, including contentious, subjects. The only obstacle to this is Outlook refusing to provide an opinion, as they did for the forum on left unity in Euro-elections in Action no48, to which the SWP, Socialist Party, Scottish Socialist Party, the AWL and John Palmer contributed.

4. Outlook have always had the opportunity to contribute to, sell and distribute Action.

5. However, for nearly four years Outlook, as an organisation, have not taken any copies of Action. From September John Lister’s involvement in the production and editing has been minimal. To this extent Outlook have excluded themselves from the campaign and its paper.

6. The WSN democratically agreed by a majority vote to publish Action fortnightly. Socialist Outlook have gone off in a huff, complaining that decisions have been “rammed through”. They have withdrawn from practical collaboration as a means of protest. They simply lost the vote!

7. Outlook knew the direction the AWL wanted to take with Action - making it a broad socialist newspaper - because we have debated and discussed these things!

8. The truth is Outlook did not want the AWL to be able to develop Action as a political paper for the labour movement, because they feared that if we did that the AWL would be able to use it as a political tool - not because the paper would be a closed AWL affair, but because AWL activists would be the most energetic in promoting it. If Outlook did not have the energy to sell both their tendency paper and Action,they were damned if the AWL were going to be allowed to. Outlook have proceeded on the basis of organisational jealously.

I expect socialists to try to adopt a critical open-mindedness about any issue. So what kind of account is ‘Economists fall out’ from someone whose organisation claims to be in the vanguard of clear, honest, open debate? You should try checking some facts and make at least a rudimentary attempt to weigh up the veracity of people’s claims, instead of making judgements based on prejudices.

Unfortunately I suspect this kind of reasoning is in keeping with your whole attitude to the labour movement, which I would characterise as a cynical standoffishness. Such an attitude leads you to try and insult us by calling us “economists”. If seeking to agitate around what Marx called the political economy of the working class, the social gains made by our class over 100 years or more, is to be an “economist”, I’ll plead guilty as charged and be proud of it.

The AWL bases its practice on the idea of transitional demands: ie, we think demands “for state-of-the-art healthcare, free at the point of need” can mobilise our class, help strengthen the movement and educate workers about the need for socialism. Politics for us can be about making agitation - it isn’t just about intra-left polemics, however important those may be.

Right now we are getting on with the job of producing Action for Solidarity. We invite anyone on the left, including Socialist Outlook, and the readers of the Weekly Worker too, to write for and provide debate for its pages.

Cathy Nugent
Alliance for Workers’ Liberty

Scargill in power?

I would genuinely not wish to be “vile and offensive” to Bob Paul (Letters Weekly Worker February 11), especially in view of such reasoned arguments. Nor do I ignore the barbaric discrimination inflicted by capitalist society against homosexual orientation, racial minorities, etc; or not support the rights of all the oppressed to fight back to change all foul laws; or doubt that such campaigns aid the general struggle to defeat the capitalist state.

Communist revolutionaries are as welcome from the ranks of single-issue reformism (feminism, black nationalism, animal rights, ecologism, homosexualism, alternative lifestyles, etc) as out of any other struggles for justice and liberty, but my experience is that such ideological concerns largely coincide with, and help sustain, the most virulent anti-communism - invariably due to the extreme subjectivism of such interests and beliefs, leaving people totally disarmed when faced with the massive worldwide brainwashing power of CIA-masterminded anti-workers’ state propaganda.

Subjective anti-communism has been a bad enough obstacle in the revolutionary movement. Non-political subjectivism has now blanketed the world in counterrevolutionary confusion of even dafter idealist philosophies. I say Tiananmen Square was a CIA counterrevolutionary stunt, correctly dispersed by the Chinese workers’ state - and argue that in Marxist science it is the continued strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat that will alone see workers’ states to the withering away of all state power in the future. Predictably, another Weekly Worker article (February 11) ignores the quotes from Engels and Lenin I gave and implies that I argue that proletarian dictatorship is the key to workers’ state history solely because I wish to eliminate gays. Such subjectivism makes rational argument impossible.

Homosexual existence and lifestyle as such could not possibly be of concern to the fight for revolutionary communist consciousness. As with Engels’ notoriously homophobic letter to Marx of June 22 1869, a polemical problem arises when any rationalisation of subjective idealist philosophising starts to play a reactionary role.

There were no less than three attacks in your February 11 issue on the damage done by ‘politically correct’ self-righteousness. That is all that I was attacking in the Mark Trotter case, which started off this whole argument. The same with the grotesque New Labour government lies in the Ron Davies affair. If that story had been only about one individual’s sad search for emotional/sexual comfort, sympathy alone would have been the issue. But the huge web of hypocrisy, lies and deceit built up around Davies by New Labour before, during and after his tragic ordeal - solely to suit New Labour’s political purposes - tells me that ridicule is in order.

Any single-issue subjective philosophy which used its reformist PC self-righteousness to block political ridicule (as Weekly Worker correspondents have done over the Trotter and Davies cases) should merit any communist’s condemnation. Most counterblasts against the Economic and Philosophic Science Review have been pure hypocrisy anyway, fired for completely different political motives, as with John Pearson’s latest broadside (February 11). Such vengeful venom is exactly typical of this appalling epoch of anti-Marxist subjectivism. When is the Weekly Worker ever going to face up seriously to the huge central historical problem of how to understand the dictatorship of the proletariat, and deal with Engel’s letter to Bebel ridiculing “the sheer nonsense of a ‘free people’s state’” and with Lenin’s frank admission of dictatorship “unrestricted by any laws”?

You decry Stalinophobia occasionally on detail, but you never take on the really vast picture of worldwide shallow public opinion made demented by nonsense about labour camps, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc, out of all proportion with the total reality of 20th century imperialist warmongering, tyranny and crimes, which account for 99.999% of the pain, terror and injustice which has befallen mankind.

No requirement of history says that socialist revolutions can only grow straight and true. They will come in all shapes and sizes. The ‘democracy’ postured about on the left is the biggest fraud ever. The entire swamp of ‘socialist alliances’ and revisionist and Trotskyite sects produces zero results through this ‘democracy’ - and all accuse each other, with some justification, of being tyrannies in their internal affairs.

So what sort of workers’ state would the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in Britain produce? Total backstabbing chaos. I would still back it unconditionally, but I would anticipate some very poor decisions and some very rough justifications for a very long time. What if “the whole stinking corpse of Scargillism” took power, to quote you? And in harness with even less enlightened remnants of the ‘left’ TUC bureaucracy? With state power in its hands, how much ‘democracy’ and civilised administration and organisation will there be, and how moderated would be your reactions to its absence, and how would that workers’ state then respond to your further protests?

The Weekly Worker is part of a worldwide anti-Soviet drift to the right which ends up with the supposed ‘left’ saying ‘no’ to revolution as routinely as organised reaction does - undermining any possibility of a revolutionary movement by its endless factionalism. You will argue that my expulsion from the SLP has proved you correct for refusing to accept the Scargillite project on his terms because it would be stillborn. I think it could yet provide a centrist vehicle for reviving mass working class interest in socialism.

Bob Paul ridicules my guessing at what a transformed stable society under an established workers’ state might conclude about same-sex relationships. He might be right. Human relationships may go off in all sorts of unexpected directions. I only remain convinced, however, that the huge subjective concentration on single-issue politics continues to be a total distraction from anti-capitalist revolutionary science.

Royston Bull
Stockport

Latter-day Sparts

Mormons believe that the devil and his alternative to god is such a threat because of their similarity. The Spartacist League operate off a similar formula - the closer you are to their creed without being part of it, the more dangerous you become, the more you must be ruthlessly denounced.

Your article on the Sparts (Weekly Worker February 18) brought back unhappy memories - of invites to public platforms simply to be set up for public attack on the most obscure of points. My own NUM branch was accused loudly and publicly of organising a racialist march and rally at a scab wharf! The truth was that in response to the South African NUM’s call for a boycott of apartheid coal we had targeted the wharf at which the coal was being shipped in.

The Sparts picketed our local branch meeting selling newspapers, denouncing me and asking one of our few Caribbean miners what he thought of the “racialist Hatfield branch”. He responded by turning a fire hose on them. The following edition of the paper talked about the anti-red witch hunt attack upon their innocent paper-sellers.

Worse than that, during a strike pickets from Frickley turned up at my pit, which was on holiday, and tried to persuade safety workers not to work. Someone told the men that all the other pits were being allowed safety cover and they should proceed to work. One malevolent Spart paper-seller started the rumour that this bloke was me (I was actually on holiday).

None of my members crossed the line, but the following issue’s headline shouted that Dave Douglass “talks left but walks right”, took his men across a picket line and encouraged the pit to scab! This was the most serious and disgusting accusation anyone had ever made against me and of course was utterly untrue. I would rather be found dead on a picket line than cross one.

I have ceased all contact with the Sparts to this day until they lift that vile and scandalous slander against myself and my branch.

Dave Douglass
Doncaster