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I am a member of the Socialist Labour Party in Merseyside and am committed to fighting against social injustice, poverty and social exclusion. I would like to take this opportunity to express my anger at the way Arthur Scargill is being seemingly demonised by the various leftwing papers. Arthur Scargill is not perfect, but what leader is? The fact is that he is the best we have and at the end of the day his heart is in the right place.

Isn’t it about time that the left stopped fighting amongst themselves and concentrated on trying to bring about a better state of affairs for the working class people of Great Britain? There’s much talk of a socialist alliance. This would be a great step forward if it worked, but would it? One has to be realistic and accept that the likelihood of this ever happening is doubtful, to say the least.

Yet just think what could be achieved if the left joined together in harmony, accepting each other’s views and ideologies, with one express intention of bringing an end to this present rotten system. Of course one of the main factors that would be needed would be a total commitment to democracy and freedom of speech, no matter how diverse the content of that speech. In my opinion there can be no true democracy without diversity and a free flow of information.

There can be no perfect state of affairs, no perfect political party. As free-thinking libertarians and altruists, we must put all our efforts into bringing about a better state of affairs, instead of in-fighting and factionalism.

Jim Long
Liverpool

Rally round

The Socialist Alliance election project has broken down because the SWP and others have chickened out. The SWP fears that its 8,000 paper membership may be shown up at the polls.

May I offer an additional explanation?

The CPGB is continuously pointing out that many of the SLP candidates are Stalin Society members. The CPGB is doing a bit of witch-hunting here, saying, in effect, ‘Do you want to vote for these headbangers?’

Look at the innocuous names of the Socialist Alliance constituents: eg, Socialist Workers Party, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, etc. With one exception: the CPGB. It was evident at Socialist Alliance meetings that the CPGB was playing the leading role. Everybody else was talking a load of left socialist rubbish from the heart. By way of contrast, the CPGB representatives, John Bridge, Anne Murphy, etc, were quite the statesmen. The CPGB was playing the leading role in the Socialist Alliance, just as the Association of Communist Workers is playing the leading role in the SLP. How long before somebody started witch-hunting the headbangers of the CPGB?

The collapse of the Socialist Alliance means that there is only one credible left socialist alternative in England. So why not rally round and help the SLP instead of wasting time in futile litigation or in winning a few hundred votes for the ‘Weekly Worker’ candidates? The CPGB and the Weekly Worker have far more important work to do.

Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see Arthur out in Strasbourg - though perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Ivor Kenna
North London

Even worse

Comrade James Frazer finds the term ‘Pol Potism’ “baffling and bewildering” when applied to the politics of Arthur Scargill (Letters Weekly Worker April 22). He also adds that the Weekly Worker’s use of the term leaves it “bereft of scientific meaning”, attributing its regrettable appearance to the subjective and “Kafkaesque” paranoia of the author (comrade Marcus Larsen - April 15).

I can only conclude that comrade Frazer is unfamiliar with works such as the Communist manifesto, Holy family, German ideology, etc. Nor does he appear to be particularly acquainted with the contents of the Weekly Worker or the CPGB’s Draft programme (or even the back issues of The Leninist). It should self-evident that all experiments in “local” or “national” communism have led to mind-stultifying backwardness - and, yes, to state-slavery of a sort which should be abhorrent to all Marxists. You can never say it enough: socialism is international or it is nothing.

Yes, comrade Frazer, I agree with you that Arthur Scargill has no “secret plans” for a British ‘year zero’. He does not need any. It is openly pronounced in SLP publications (policy documents, Socialist News, etc) and by Scargill himself in public forums - “Vote us in to get us out” ... of the world.

Imagine a Scargillite-run Britain, which has been (somehow) wrenched away from Europe and is ruled like the SLP writ large. Scientific socialism (ie, Marxism) - not to mention common sense - tells us that such a society, and social formation, would in fact be worse than Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Russia and China were on the margins of the world economy - Cambodia even more so. Britain, on the other hand, is a capitalistically advanced country which lies at the hub of the world economy. It could not survive at its present level of culture for even a month ‘on its own’, even with a booming Cuba for a trading partner. The trauma produced by such a dislocation would inevitably lead to the common ruination of all classes and to a new dark age. Faced with the attractive prospects of autarky and state terror, the masses would literally be fighting each other to escape the ‘socialist’ island paradise.

Danny Hammill
South London

CPGB and Nato

The headline ‘Balkans war unites internationalists’ (Weekly Worker April 22) was belied by the obvious lack of unity, described by Marcus Larsen, on the part of those who participated in the April 14 meeting in London.

The first agreed slogan, ‘Stop the Nato bombing’, represents the immediate demand for action by the government. It is a slogan that not only unites internationalists, but also unites them with others and, if this aggression by global imperialism is going to be exposed or perhaps even stopped, that unity is crucial. The slogan, ‘Nato out of the Balkans’, represents a medium-term demand.

A longer-term demand would be represented by the slogan, ‘Disband Nato’. Of course, this slogan would not be supported by those who are naive enough to believe in the possibility that global imperialism might have a ‘progressive and humanitarian’ military role to play. This role is put forward by the imperialists in their slogan, ‘Stop the ethnic cleansing’, which represents the main thrust of their justification for their aggression. The participants at the April 14 meeting nevertheless saw fit to uphold this slogan, which clearly represents an immediate demand for action by the government. Perhaps one of the participants could explain how that demand squares with the demand for Nato to stop the bombing and get out of the Balkans. In this context, the slogan, ‘Self-determination for the Kosovars’, ceases to be a call (correct or otherwise) for communists to support a particular political position. Effectively, it also becomes a demand for action by the Nato governments.

The disunity at the April 14 meeting was revealed when a number of participants, who wisely recognised the conditions that pertain at the present time, shied away from supporting the slogan, ‘Arm the KLA’, which was put forward by the ‘CPGB’. The slogan, ‘Arm the KLA’, is an immediate demand for action by government. Who else is going to supply those arms, if it isn’t the Nato states? Perhaps the ‘CPGB’ could explain how the demand to arm the KLA squares with the demand for Nato to get out of the Balkans.

The ‘CPGB’ persists in applying the principle of revolutionary defeatism to every major, inter-capitalist confrontation. Essentially, it views the world as being comprised of a relatively ordered spectrum of imperialist states, from the lesser to the greater. As a consequence of this mistaken view, it incorrectly applies the principle of revolutionary defeatism, which is applicable to both sides in an inter-imperialist war. The principle of revolutionary defeatism is not applicable to a war launched against a non-imperialist, capitalist state by the combined military forces of global imperialism.

During an inter-imperialist war, a call for self-determination of a nation oppressed by imperialism becomes part of the struggle around the principle of revolutionary defeatism. In the present conflict, the principle of self-determination has to be subordinated to the principle of unconditional opposition to global imperialism.

Dave Norman
London

Two Outlooks

At a meeting I attended on April 16, a number of organisations agreed to work together in opposing the Nato intervention in the Balkans, whilst at the same time raising the demand for self-determination for Kosovars.

As most of the organisations in attendance (including my own organisation, Socialist Outlook) supported the demand for arming the KLA, the meeting decided that it would not be necessary to place this as a central demand.

During the meeting there was some discussion of the position of other groups not in attendance, including that of the Socialist Party. I argued that the position of one or other far left group was not a major concern of ours. What was important was developing a principled, internationalist line that could have maximum impact upon class consciousness. As such I argued that many people might have a basically principled position, but might not have been convinced as yet for the need to arm the KLA, and that it would be sectarian in the extreme to place such a demand as a barrier to working with others who are genuinely interested in finding a working class, internationalist solution to the crisis in Kosova. I also argued that we should attempt to work with such people, whilst trying to convince them in the process of the need to arm the only Kosovar group that is currently engaged in armed self-defence.

I was intrigued to read in the Weekly Worker (‘Balkans war unites internationalists’, April 22) that on the same day a different Simon Deville, in a different Socialist Outlook, attended a meeting on Kosova and argued that the meeting he attended should not adopt the slogan of ‘Arm the Kosovars’, as the SP “might not support it”.

Whilst I disagree with the methodology and the reasoning behind the argument put forward by Simon Deville in the parallel universe of the CPGB, I fully support the conclusions of this other Simon Deville as to how the principled left should be working together in opposing the Nato war and opposing the ethnic cleansing of Kosova being carried out by the Serbian state.

Simon Deville
Socialist Outlook

Shame on you

Trotsky once said that sectarians are essentially opportunists who are afraid of themselves. In what better way can that claim be affirmed than by reading comrade James Paris’s letter to the Weekly Worker (April 1)? Now, the Marxist Workers’ Group is definitely one of the healthier epigones of Trotsky’s movement, having a thoroughly proletarian orientation and an analysis of the demise of the Fourth International which is definitely far more advanced than your average Trot outlet. Still, they have not succeeded in breaking with some of the most central aspects of degenerate post-FI ‘Trotskyism’ and comrade Paris’s contribution to the discussion is a prime example of these mistakes.

Obviously, Nato doesn’t give a flying fuck about the Kosovar people. The sole and only reason for the bombings is the interests of Wall Street, the City and Frankfurt. Therefore, communists should oppose this intervention and call for a victory to Serbia. First of all because Serbia has the same right to self-determination as Croatia has, and second, such a victory would be a major impulse to class struggle both in the Nato countries and Yugoslavia. Working people in the USA will be spurred on and consider the reasons for the war, as ‘their’ bourgeoisie faces defeat, and working people in Yugoslavia will understand that if they could defeat Nato, they could certainly defeat Milosevic.

The mistake comrade Paris commits is seeing Kosovar self-determination as opposed to military victory for Yugoslavia. He buys his ‘own’ bourgeoisie’s war propaganda and it stems from a misinterpreted conception of the mechanisms behind the war, as well as a petty bourgeois conception of the method of Marxism. When comrade Paris makes the claim that communists can no longer defend Kosovar self-determination because of the KLA’s support of Nato, he commits the same mistake as the opportunists: he equates the working masses of Kosova with a petty bourgeois leadership.

But national self-determination for Kosova remains a cause for all Yugoslav workers, just as defeat of Nato remains a cause for the Kosovar people. Serb workers have no interest whatsoever in keeping the Kosovar workers under the yoke of the Serb bourgeoisie. If the Kosovar workers want self-determination, Serb workers should make this their demand. Also, if the KLA have their way now, they will never get any real self-determination and absolutely no possibility to develop it towards socialism. What they will get is Kosovar autonomy reaching the level Washington decides. They will be freed from the shackles of Belgrade only to come under the yoke of Washington.

The main problem we face today is that Yugoslav workers are not likely to support the cause for Kosovar self-determination now. They are rather likely to respond as comrade Paris has done, seeing the Kosovar people as the stooges of Nato, and take out their revenge upon them. Just as we need to oppose US imperialism, we need to oppose such a revenge. To do this, we need a programme of action based upon the transitional method.

I would like comrade Paris to consider to what extent unconditional support for a country against imperialism stretches. I find comrade Paris’s attitude towards the victims of Yugoslav repression and cruelties disturbing, to say the least. Communists defend the Yugoslav people against imperialism, not their leadership, and we certainly do not buy their propaganda and lies. We definitely do not diminish or justify their pogroms against the working people of minority populations. Shame on you!

Last, but not least, I would like to thank the Communist Party of Great Britain and its paper, the Weekly Worker, for the generosity and unsectarianness in lending space for this letter, which would otherwise not be published.

Gustav Mowitz
Berlin

Kautskyite

Dave Craig’s report (Weekly Worker April 22) on two meetings of republicans in the SSP is somewhat less than honest. In fact, I would go so far as to say it calls into question whether the CPGB ought to rely on any more material from this dubious source.

Craig refers to an “independent Trotskyist” at the February meeting. That was me. According to Craig, I voted against adopting the slogan of ‘revolutionary democracy’ because I wanted nothing more than ‘reformist democracy’. Myself and a supporter of Socialist Outlook did refuse to endorse this slogan without prior explanation as to what it meant. Given its contraposition to workers’ power, it struck us both as a capitulation to the Stalinist stages theory. Craig told us that if he was content to support it without knowing what it meant, why should we feel we had a right to know what we were voting for!

At the Glasgow Marxist Forum meeting on the federal republic, I was able to quote Lenin’s dismissal of an above-class democracy. Craig and his CFR disciples had ample opportunity to answer Lenin then. And my article, ‘What sort of federal republic?’ (Weekly Worker April 15), gave Craig a third opportunity to respond to Lenin’s condemnation of a pure democracy, an above-class democracy, as the “mendacious phrase of the liberal who wants to fool the workers”.

Having had his rightwing Kautskyite politics exposed in print, Craig has come up with a cunning plan. He runs away from my questions and pretends that those who vote against endorsing his meaningless soundbite politics are motivated by support for ‘reformist democracy’.

I would recommend that the CPGB makes a sober assessment of where rapprochement with the RDG is going.

Tom Delargy
Paisley

Surreal

It is a telling sign of your own weakness when, in order to lend some credibility to your views, you have to attribute outlandish and ludicrous views to your opponent. Comrade Dave Craig’s tendentious report of the discussion which took place at the Glasgow Marxist Forum on whether socialists should campaign for a federal republic is factually so wide of the mark as to assume a surreal character (Weekly Worker April 8).

Apparently in my contribution I defended the monarchy and praised the honour and veracity of the British ruling class! Of course in point of fact I said no such thing. I am for a socialist republic and would not trust the ruling class to do anything but defend their own power and privilege ‘by all means necessary’.

The nub of the real debate can be stated thus: does the demand for a federal republic provide a focus which can mobilise the working class and its allies in the struggle against capital in the UK? Or is it a lifeless abstraction, which not only does not mobilise the working class, but in reality plays into the hands of the petty bourgeois nationalists by focusing on an alleged denial of Scotland’s right to self-determination?

I take the latter view for two reasons. Firstly, the Scottish people suffer no national oppression. I am uncertain whether Dave Craig and his comrade in arms, Jack Conrad, believe that the lack of a written constitution guaranteeing Scotland’s right of self-determination is a form of national oppression.

Secondly, the Scottish people already have that right. If the Scots want independence or a parliament with full powers, they can vote for it. So far they have chosen not to. If the majority of Scots voted for independence and the UK state refused to recognise that decision, then the right to self-determination would be infringed in the real world and not just in Dave Craig’s head. However, that scenario is extremely unlikely, as independence in Europe is no threat to the ruling class. All the bourgeois parties have said that they accept the right of the Scots to obtain independence. Every Scottish nationalist I have met has accepted that the principal reason Scotland does not have its ‘freedom’ is due to the Scots not voting for it.

To think that the demand for a federal republic somehow provides an effective answer to the nationalist project is to misunderstand what the basis of this project is. It is not an inchoate response to national oppression or absence of democracy, but a middle class project to carve out a more lucrative relationship with global capitalism. Working class support for this project is limited, largely unenthusiastic and premised on the lack of a viable socialist alternative. There have been no demonstrations of any size and no strikes calling for self-determination. The demand has been either irrelevant or used as a slogan by the labour bureaucracy in an attempt to blunt proletarian self-activity. The CPGB demand for “genuine self-determination” only plays into their hands.

Thirdly, the working class is not going into battle for a federal republic because such a project provides no answer to its exploitation and oppression. This demand has never featured in past struggles of the British working class.

In response to Blair’s constitutional reform we should advance the old Chartist demand for annual parliaments, as well as the demand for a European constituent assembly. These democratic demands should be raised within the context of a fight for a workers’ government and a socialist republic on a European level at least.

Sandy McBurney
Glasgow Marxist Forum

Factional only

Jim Blackstock’s article ‘Minority rights and the CPGB’ (Weekly Worker April 29) spectacularly misses the point in replying to my letter criticising a ‘majority’ view on the USSR being presented as that of the ‘CPGB’ (March 18). By circumscribing the ability of the paper to present ‘majority’ opinions - that have not received the blessing of a formal aggregate vote - as those of the Party, I am apparently guilty of the sin of “formalism”.

Absolute nonsense. If comrade Blackstock could be bothered to read my letter properly he would find that a comparison between the CPGB and the practices of the rest of the left informed much of its content: “One of the CPGB’s main bones of contention with the rest of the left has been their desire to bury our differences and stifle debate in the cause of ‘unity’”.

The CPGB has recently come under attack in the Socialist Alliances because it has stuck out against the idea of ‘consensus’. The idea behind this ‘consensus’ culture is that the most advanced and the most backward strategies can function together: clarity and sharp differences are thus frowned upon. This is nothing more than a recipe for paralysis. Revolutionaries can have no impact on society if we merely seek to pander to a prevailing consensus.

‘Consensus’ is therefore the bedfellow of opportunism and it is no coincidence that it has been used against the revolutionary politics of the CPGB on more than one occasion. This forms the backdrop to my disgruntlement with comrade Hammill’s piece on the doomed London SA launch (March 11). Hammill correctly decried lowest-common-denominator platitudes - it is quite obvious that the left could unite with its differences in plain view. Therefore Anne Murphy’s views on the USSR (which, as comrade Blackstock suggests, has only an indirect relation to contemporary politics) should have been the occasion in which Hammill counterposed the disciplined, critical and open politics of the CPGB to the consensual (bureaucratically imposed or otherwise), opportunistic drivel of the British left.

Instead we were given something which sounded distinctly like the ruminations of a Trotskyite sect. Either this is extremely poor tactics or comrades could just not pass up the opportunity to have a factional dig at the CPGB ‘minority’. Having said that, I am looking forward immensely to the ‘CPGB’s view’ of Shostakovich - after we have voted on it of course!

Phil Watson
Liverpool

Celtic musings

I doubt if you can publish this letter because I don’t exist (Jack Conrad ‘Towards a more truthful history’ Weekly Worker April 15). But, as a cradle commie raised by tankies in the 50s, I still outrank you.

The latest style fad of the post-modernists, post-revisionists, post-feminists, etc is that the Celts never happened. Having proven to their own satisfaction that the holocaust was a colossal fake, they then go on to erase the Celts from history.

So I laboriously trawl through 2,500 words of close-set type with no pictures, sub-headings, jokes or sub-text, and what is this great, world-changing proof of the annihilation of the Celts? The classical stereotype Celt is tribes of warrior women with similar language, culture, spirituality, etc. If I were going to disprove the Celts, I would explode the stereotype. No chance! The post-modernists swallow the stereotype, hook, line and sinker.

So where’s the beef? For 2,400 words here’s the classic stereotype: our expansion from the Danube to the Pillars of Hercules, our deep spirituality, our mighty heroic deeds. Wallowing in purple prose, gushing like a Disney movie. Then the punchline. The Celts don’t exist because we are only invented in the 17th century by a bunch of politically motivated intellectuals who noticed the similarities between all these disparate tribes and categorised us.

Our common language didn’t unite us into one nation. It meant that we could keep squabbling even while the Romans are at our gates. And what have the Romans ever done for us? Put us under a common oppression. Bound us into a common destiny. Taught us we are all one. That is how nations are born, just like people - in pain and hope and love.

The post-modernist paradigm is that the Celtic nations were only noticed by reformation academics, and before that we were just a bunch of squabbling tribes with no thought of unity. Congratulations, Jack Conrad, you have just discovered ideology! And you have disproved the existence of the left - a bunch of squabbling tribes, etc, etc, etc.

Ideology is the fourth principle of Marxist-Leninism. Ideas do not spring fully-armed from the head of Zeus. Materialists know that ideas grow and die in response to social need. Celts felt the need for the idea of Celts, and now others need to kill that idea by ethnically cleansing history.

Owen Glyndwr proposed a Celtic alliance in 1400. In 1330 Edward Bruce, brother of Robert, was elected King of Ireland. The 8th century poem Armes Prydein prayed for the alliance. Before that, the Druidic faith was our focus for unity. But the idea never caught on, because the notion of racially organised states is anathema to the democratic spirit of Celtia.

Daffyd ap Thomas
Caerdydd