Letters

Year Zero?

For many years Arthur Scargill has been considered a good working class militant. The miners’ strike of 84-85 pays testimony to that. However, since his break with the Labour Party, if not Labourism, he has exhibited strong authoritarian leadership in the SLP. The witch-hunting of communists, socialists and democrats is ample proof of that. The Weekly Worker has played a decisive role in exposing this ‘Stalinist’ method of organisation.

However, your description of Scargill is this time well wide of the mark. You claim: “His politics are little Englandism in the extreme - a mix of NUMism and Pol Potism” (April 15). While I do not object to the correct labelling of Scargill as a British chauvinist - ie, ‘Little Englander’ - and an NUMist - ie, trade union consciousness - I find the term “Pol Potism” baffling and bewildering. If “Pol Potism” is to be applicable to Scargill, it has become a term bereft of scientific meaning.

If you really believe Scargill has secret plans for a ‘year zero’ after he has pulled Britain out of Europe you are clearly allowing your critique to be coloured by the worst Kafkaesque nightmare.

James Frazer
Shrewsbury

Milosevic

You jeer at the Economic and Philosophic Science Review’s analysis, misrepresenting it as “unconditional support” for the Milosevic regime. But you are incapable of providing any adequate explanation for this insane Nato barbarism. No “Pavlovian anti-imperialism” in support of “ersatz anti-imperialism” is needed to see that the last thing the west could care about is the ‘democratic rights of Serbia’s Albanian minority. You are throwing up the ‘red-brown’ smokescreen against the EPSR to cover up your own confusion.

You get things wrong because you are Pavlovian anti-Stalinists, and are too class-driven by petty-bourgeois moralising to grasp the EPSR’s historically-scientific anti-Stalinism.

The tragic catastrophe for the Albanian minority is appalling suffering; and Serbian nationalism is ultimately degenerate reactionary nonsense - like all nationalism. But defeat for this conscious, deliberate act of Nato-imperialist warmongering is the only interest now from a world revolutionary point of view, via splits in this barbaric conspiracy, as it stubs its toe on riled Serbian nationalism. For the 100th time, when will you grasp that ‘defeat for Nato’ does not mean ‘a victory for Milosevic’, no more than Bolshevism’s call for imperialist Russia’s ‘defeat’ meant a call for imperialist Germany’s ‘victory’?

It is five years since the KLA decided to become Contra-like stooges for US imperialism’s CIA advance-guard. It was the KLA which decided to challenge the Serbian state to a civil war, backed by US imperialism. To keep on trumpeting the irrelevant academic ‘right to self-determination’ in these circumstances can do little but help prolong the suffering, and raises the suspicion that you have no more real interest in the ‘poor Albanian people’ than the wretched Nato apologists.

Royston Bull
Former SLP vice-president

Small step

Martin Blum claims that I derided Anne Murphy’s vote in the Hackney Defoe by-election (Letters Weekly Worker April 15). I did no such thing. I simply argued that it was a disappointing result, in light of an improved programme and the extensive delivery of an election address, canvassing and public meetings organised by many comrades from different parties and groups, including myself.

Lewisham Socialist Alliance’s vote in the recent Downham by-election was a more limited intervention. A local newsletter was delivered to most of the ward, with an attempt to lay down a marker and draw into our alliance new comrades and make contact with community activists.

The 54 votes gained by our candidate was the first intervention Lewisham SA had made into the ward, unlike the intervention by Ann Murphy which followed on from the previous May’s borough election. The primary difference however is that our candidate’s intervention peeled off a larger layer of the most militant and class conscious and helped depress the Labour vote by four percent. The intervention by Ann Murphy resulted in the Labour vote increasing and saw Labour snatch back the seat.

Our result in Lewisham has however strengthened the argument for targeting a ward and focusing limited resources on local community campaigning. The likely, regrettable, collapse of the London Socialist Alliance Euro intervention does allow us to build on the unity gained over the previous months and focus on joint work across boroughs for the assembly elections next year.

Nick Long
South London

Soviet untruth

Comrade Watson raises up an important point in his letter ‘CPGB views’ (Weekly Worker March 18). Quite correctly he points out the mistake attributed to Comrade Murphy in relation to the Party’s approach to the USSR.

However, one is left feeling somewhat dissatisfied with such slapdash editing of material. This wholly incorrect statement should have carried an apology and correction by the editor. The Party “majority” is not the same as the Party policy. This is not simply a formal position. If indeed this was the policy of the CPGB, it would be incumbent on all members to argue for this political perspective. In reality those who hold counter views are not bound to argue this - false in my opinion - understanding the Soviet Union.

Political mischief and provocation are more likely factors that drove the editor to allow such flagrant untruths to appear in the Weekly Worker. To a section of the Party the Soviet Union as constituted 1917-1991 represented a form of socialism. The escalating denunciating of “Stalin and his cohorts” in public spheres, Party meetings and press almost match the high point of Trotskyite hysteria. The CPGB “majority” is in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in its scramble to distance itself from the Soviet model of socialism and its own past.

The CPGB has been the highest expression of class consciousness as historically constituted thus far in Britain. The Soviet Union is the highest expression of class consciousness internationally, despite all its deficiencies. I call on all those in the “majority” to inform the “minority” when, where and how its understanding of Soviet Marxism is incorrect and how exactly it ended up as a “slave society” after a workers’ revolution. Come, comrades, don’t just postulate a position - prove it!

Roger Harper
Manchester

Auto-Labourism

The April edition of Socialist Outlook contains a report by Ceri Evans detailing the events inside New Labour in Wales.

Comrade Evans reaches the following conclusions:

“The antics [of] Labour’s leadership have led many people to consider abandoning the Party in disgust. Socialist Outlook supporters believe that this is premature ... This is why we call for a Labour vote in these elections - with the idea of giving a clear majority to ensure it can be held accountable for its actions in government.”

Careful readers will have noted the thrust of the last paragraph. The dogma of auto-Labourism must be enshrined. There must be no leftwing electoral ‘stunts’ to ruin the bliss of a solid New Labour majority. In this situation expectations amongst the working class will rise. In other words, the same ‘crisis of expectations’ thesis utterly discredited by two years of New Labour hegemony.

Another piece by Dave Packer is broadly supportive of the London Socialist Alliance:

“Today we must not only build broad-based united front campaigns in action, but we need to construct united electoral alliances that can have an impact, raise the banner of socialism and offer a real political alternative to the working class and its allies to the capitalist offensive continued by this ‘New Labour’ government”.

The juxtaposition of these two articles illustrates perfectly the developing divisions over the thorny question of Labourism. The comrades in Wales are not alone in their opposition to the ‘London’ turn of their organisation. A resolution passed by Merseyside on April 11 notes the development of a left unity slate for the North West European elections, remarking that “the left groups involved in this electoral bloc are involved in an objectively sectarian campaign that amounts to little more that ‘waving little red flags’, and that this will not break workers from either adherence to the Labour Party, or a belief in reformism”. The Merseyside comrades therefore argue that they need to maintain their “strategic orientation to the Labour Party”.

Judging from the lack of editorial comment in this month’s Socialist Outlook, we are presumably meant to believe that these opposing sides are coexisting quite happily with each other. However, they appear to be maturing into an inevitable faction fight.

July 1999 was provisionally set as the date for the national conference of the ISG. There are currently rumours afoot that those enthusiastic about the ‘London turn’ (around Alan Thornett) are seeking to postpone this to a later date. The perceived strategy behind this is focused on the ISG’s fusion negotiations with two different groups: Workers Action and Socialist Perspectives. Workers Action have broadly the same perspective on New Labour as the auto-Labourites in the ISG. Socialist Perspectives on the other hand support the project of left unity slates against New Labour. The suspicion is that the conference is being stalled so that the relationship between the London comrades and Socialist Perspectives has time to bear fruit.

Of course you will read none of this in the pages of Socialist Outlook. Even when the editors see fit to publish two completely contradictory pieces they have to surreally pretend that everything is still-hunky dory in the ISG.

Stuart Jameson
Liverpool