Letters

Cheap shot

You cannot help tripping over your own big feet, can you? The Weekly Worker (March 4) says: “Nowadays, the very definition of respectability is to be anti-racist - not to mention anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, etc. Clearly anti-racism is now part of bourgeois ideology” (original emphasis). Some contradiction surely with your PC sniping at the Economic and Philosophic Science Review for being “homophobic”?!

After all, the EPSR has made it patently clear that its comments on single-issue gay rights campaigning or the Mark Trotter and Ron Davies scandals are about the PC cover-up for capitalist society and parliamentary abuses of power, coupled with the attempted scientific sketching of some of the problems associated with adopting the “new ideology’s” lightminded PC attitudes to sexuality and human development.

The Weekly Worker article quite correctly throws together bourgeois anti-racism with bourgeois anti-homophobia. Let me tell you that, for arguing for Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism, the EPSR has been called “racist” many times by black nationalists.

So put a sock in the cheap-shot “homophobic” jibes. Attempt to argue scientifically with all the analysis you do not like.

Get all self-righteously offended about our failure to toe the PC line and put yourself in the camp of the “new ideology” which is “embraced - eagerly and genuinely - by virtually all sections of the establishment”, “thoroughly safe”, etc, etc: ie, poisonously anti-Marxist.

Chris Barratt
EPSR

Make or break

In December 1997 I wrote an article for Labour Briefing suggesting that the SLP would be an important element in the emergence of a new left party. I still hold to that view.

Delphi (Weekly Worker March 18), in comparing the development of socialist parties at the turn of the last century and their role in the formation of larger parties, appears to be coming round to a similar perspective. It must be remembered that socialists in these early parties had to fight tooth and nail against the sectarianism of their founders and leaders in order to link up with other socialists in order to build and sustain a political party of some weight and influence. Let’s hope the declining membership of the SLP can live up to their current task.

The best hope for supporting this prospect is for the Socialist Alliance Network conference in Birmingham on March 27 to be a success. It is essential that the conference adopts its founding policies and agrees its constitutional structure. It is essential that it establishes a national contributory membership and has an accountable leadership.

Unless the Socialist Alliance moves forward the danger is that it will lose the momentum it has gained and fragment. This year is likely to be a ‘make or break’ year for the political developments of the left. If the Socialist Alliance fails in Birmingham we face the nightmare of the Stalinist SLP rising like a corpse from the grave.

Important ground-breaking developments have already taken place for the left. Despite the claims of Delphi, the Socialist Alliance and its allied forces are well and truly on the slipway. For the first time ever the Labour Party will face a national challenge from the left in the regional assembly elections in Scotland and Wales and the Euro elections. The tragedy is that the left will be split between the SLP and the forces around the Socialist Alliance.

The Socialist Alliance has registered as a political party and it seems likely it will stand in at least three regions. The Socialist Alliance is being joined by comrades in Wales standing as United Socialists-Sosialwyr Unedig. The Scottish Socialist Party has mounted a successful campaign to overturn its initial non-registration and is standing in both the assembly and Euro election, along with interventions in local elections. Comrades in the East Midlands have registered as the Alternative Labour List and in Yorkshire and Humberside as the Left Alliance. It is a pity that some component forces involved in the Socialist Alliance are engaged in attempting to register separate political parties and looking to line the pockets of lawyers to register. This diversity and pluralism however is in marked contrast to the SLP, which has almost ceased to function at a local and campaigning level.

A socialist unity conference later in the year will need to be held to take stock and draw out the lessons and debate the need to build on the unity developed over the year. The thousands who are likely to vote socialist will want to see something lasting develop. Hopefully Delphi will have broken from the Great Leader concept of building a party by then and will join us!

Nick Long
Lewisham

SSP opposition

Alan Ross of the Campaign for a Federal Republic (Letters, March 18) criticised my report on the Scottish Socialist Party conference (Weekly Worker March 11). Specifically, he criticised it for neglecting to cover the debate on the party’s separatist approach to the national question. He would be well advised to address his criticisms, in part at least, to Nick Clarke, his CFR colleague.

At the close of conference, I asked Nick if he could e-mail me some notes on how the session on the party programme went. Due to no fault of my own I missed virtually all of this. I told Nick I would be grateful if he would help me prepare a report on proceedings for readers of the Weekly Worker. I said we could sign the report jointly, if he wanted. Alternatively, he could file one on his own - if, that is, he was still prepared to help his old comrades. Nick promised he would give me his help. I regret to have to inform Weekly Worker readers that he let me down.

If I did not highlight the CFR vote, Alan ought to be grateful to me for sparing his blushes. Out of 200 delegates, they won over a mere handful. Relatively speaking, their vote remained as pitiful as it did at last year’s Scottish Socialist Alliance conference. The fact that Alan ‘forgot’ to offer any figures to illustrate the extent of their ‘advance’ is ample testimony as to the paucity of their impact.

I have to accept responsibility for persuading Mary Ward and Nick Clarke to join the SSP in the face of a call by others (Weekly Worker essentially) to recommend a principled split. I asked them to join and to fight against its nationalism, encouraging them to call for dual membership of the SSP and an all-UK Network of Socialist Alliances. I proposed that, inside the party, we would put the case for the affiliation of the SSP, as a whole, to an all-UK Network. Although it took them a long time to agree, eventually they did. Given the much publicised tolerance of the SSP towards all socialists who disagree on quite substantial questions (not excluding the national question), atomised individuals such as us three had precious little alternative but to join the party.

In the last few days other labour movement activists (some ex-SLP members) who strongly disagree with the proposal for Scottish independence have also agreed to join, as has the relatively small AWL group in Scotland. It is now crucial that all these critics of SSP accommodation to nationalism start to coordinate our opposition rather than to scatter our meagre forces, fighting in total isolation from one another. I therefore appeal to Sandy McBurney and his comrades in the Glasgow Marxist Forum, AWL members, and anyone else who is interested to agree to put together a broad anti-nationalist oppositional faction in the SSP.  And I would appeal to Mary Ward and Nick Clarke to do likewise.

Here is my message for Mary and Nick. Trade in your sterile excuse for an alternative! Your single-issue ‘campaign’ without answers and without even the aspiration to recruit supporters, let alone organise a left opposition inside the SSP, is going nowhere and you both know it. Do you have your hearts set on encouraging Sandy McBurney, myself and all your natural allies inside the SSP to emulate your self-defeating tactics? Would you like to see us also set up our own equally microscopic sects parading ourselves grandly as ‘platforms’? Are you looking forward to yet more deluded individuals/couples devoting themselves to fighting each other into the ground, allowing our publicly identified common enemy, carriers (unconscious, unwilling carriers for the most part) of a crippling contagion inside the workers’ movement, nationalism, to triumph by divide-and-conquer tactics? You ought to agree to join with every other SSP internationalist to negotiate a genuine socialist alternative.

Just what exactly are you afraid of?

Tom Delargy
Paisley SSP

Progressive

I welcome Alan Thornett’s letter (Weekly Worker March 18) about Europe and only regret that it was not possible to debate the issue at the London Socialist Alliance European election campaign launch meeting because of the chair’s fear of public disagreement.

I accept his view that socialists should oppose the provisions of Maastricht, but not his ‘economistic’ method. He sees the “European bourgeoisie” as the main enemy. Hence he rejects the euro and accepts national currencies as the lesser of two evils. Also his obsession with purely economic issues like privatisation leads to him campaigning for the status quo. To do that is to lock the working class in their nationalistic past and tie them to that section of their own bourgeoisie that cannot cope with international competition. Not very clever, even on an ‘economistic’ basis, and it makes his claims of internationalism ring hollow.

The progressive capitalists have a project to unite the peoples of Europe and ultimately the world in a single market with a universal culture. It is a matter of regret that capitalism is leading this struggle, not communists, but even though it is being imposed in an anti-working class manner it is preparing the ground for socialism. Insofar as capitalism advances down this road then we need to meet like with like. They are organised politically on a European basis: we must do likewise. Their political parties are already in loose political alliances with common platforms. We are at the stage of trying to unite left factions into a party of some sort or other. A long way behind and with no clear idea of where we are going.

However, if the working class is to progress from its present defensive struggles to setting the agenda for Europe, the party question is key, as is the fight to democratise the EU from top to bottom. We need to develop a political programme suitable for a potential ruling class.

Phil Kent
East London