Letters

Permanent present

So Dave Norman (Weekly Worker May20) agrees with me that independent action by the working class differs from “a demand on government” - though his example of two militants launching missiles from a channel ferry is not what I had in mind. Rather I was thinking that we should campaign for the working class to champion the right of the Kosovars to fight to defend their homes, and for workers in Yugoslavia to support their right to independence.

However, the example does throw light on Dave’s mindset. Firstly his view of class is essentially a national one (I presume “the channel ferry” referred to is the one that plies the English Channel, not the more strategically placed Adriatic).

Secondly he restricts the term ‘working class’ to those militants directly involved in the anti-war movement. The strike on the Jolly George started over trade union demands, but they intersected with the Hands Off Russia movement and forced Lloyd George to stop sending munitions to be used against the Bolsheviks. Dave’s linear thinking makes him believe that effective anti-war action can only arise directly from the slogans of the anti-war movement and that the workers can only oppose bombing by military measures.

Thirdly his desire to put demands upon the government expresses a belief that the working class does not exist as a political reality in any meaningful way. In so far as this is true, it is clearly related to the shoddy goods that the left has tried to pass off over so many years - like ‘the Soviet Union is the answer’, or ‘social democracy leads to socialism’.

Dave wants to add to this catalogue of rubbish. He lives in what the post-modernists call the permanent present. He says we should judge the Kosovar situation only by its present leadership. He has no concept of the Kosovars as human beings traumatised by war or of Serbs disorientated by the disintegration of the world they grew up in. A human solution is needed superior to those being offered by Milosevic or Nato. One that takes into account the political and emotional reality the people are going through. The need now is for a just outcome to the present war that lays the basis for future reconciliation. Without this all talk of socialism is just hot air.

In the last week we have heard claims that there have been demonstrations in Yugoslavia against Milosevic aimed at ending the war. I expect Dave will oppose this movement because they seem ready to make peace with Nato. I do support the right of Yugoslavs (all its peoples, not the state) to self-determination. Dave only supports the right of the state to exist and he only supports that because it is at war with Nato or, should I say, imperialism.

I do not follow Dave’s claim that the CPGB is “absolutising” revolutionary defeatism. It has always been applied to specific situations. I think it is Dave who is “absolutising” imperialism, even giving it the honorific “global”. This mega beast has to be opposed absolutely. In reality Nato, which seems to be coterminous with global imperialism in the comrade’s mind, is behaving like a giant with the strength of an invalid, because it is really an alliance of states with very different political agendas. Agendas moreover shaped by the pressure of public opinion. The influence of the working class may be diffuse, but it is still crucial. Capitalism coordinates its activities across states, so the working class needs to do the same. We need a common approach from Greece to California to maximise our influence.

In Dave’s previous letter he looked forward to the day when we could demand that the government abolished Nato. I can imagine the government accepting his demand in favour of an alliance that is more united and consequently much more dangerous. The great advantage of living in the permanent present is it keeps things nice and simple, but it does nothing to provide our class with an adequate understanding to become a ruling class.

Phil Kent
North London

Unprincipled left

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current Balkans war has been the response of the ‘anti-war’ radicals. When you examine the writings of leftish and left-leaning opponents of Nato’s war against rump Yugoslavia - John Pilger, Tony Benn, Harold Pinter, Richard Gott, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky, etc - one thing becomes immediately apparent. To my knowledge, not one of these radicals has come out in defence of the right of the Kosovars to self-determination (ie, independence). If anything, some of the writings have a pro-Serbist tinge to them. Whether out of narrow anti-Americanism or a puerile desire to shock, the anti-war stance of these pinko doves is objectively anti-democratic and hence reactionary.

A fairly wretched example of this fundamentally anti-democratic approach was trotted out by the SWP fellow-traveller, Jeremy Hardy, in the pages of The Guardian recently. Like his ‘leftwing’ mates, Pilger, Pinter, etc, Hardy has completely lost the plot over Kosova/Serbia. So, Pontius Pilate-like, Hardy tells us that he is “not taking sides” in the war, because he cannot bring himself to back “any nationalism” (May 22). This is of course fully in accord with SWP social pacifistic doctrine, which states that socialism “means rejecting taking either the side of the Serb regime or the KLA”, as “war makes things worse for working people” (Lindsey German Socialist Review May).

This is a scandalous position. Socialists, by definition, support the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor - such as the ANC, PLO, Sinn Féin, etc. Kosova is an oppressed nation. Nobody in the ‘international community’ (especially the United Nations) supports the right of the Kosovars to self-determination. It is therefore the duty of socialists to oppose Nato’s militaristic campaign in the region and champion the right of the Kosovars to independence - that is, back the KLA’s just war against the Serbian state terror machine.

But Hardy’s position gets worse. He informs us that Kosova is “not in fact a Serb colony”, and that Yugoslavia was “such a multicultural society that it recognised the futility of separatist ideology”. Under both Milosevic’s and Tito’s regimes the Kosovars, for instance, were and are denied the democratic right to self-determination, and the present war is partly a tragic consequence of that. For Hardy to fail to mention this basic fact can only mean he is indeed a de facto Serb apologist.

After all, is it such a long way from Hardy’s ‘neo-Titoist’ views above to, let us say, the pro-Serb nationalist ravings of former SLP vice-president Roy Bull in the Economic and Philosophic Science Review? Not really. Or at least, it is hard not to see a line of continuum between the anti-KLAism of Hardy and the Yugoslav/Serb defencist anti-KLAism of Bull and co. Both of them diminish the struggle for democracy.

And this seems to stretch even to the newly (re)formed “Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combative Communist Party”, who last week assassinated Massimo D’Antona, a senior government adviser in Italy. In its communiqué, the Red Brigadists denounced “Nato-Kosova secessionism” and the imperialist conspiracy, as they see it, against rump Yugoslavia. The use of the Stalinite/‘official communist’-type word “secessionism” implies to me that the Red Brigades for the Construction of the Combative Communist Party also oppose the right of the Kosovars to independence.

It seems that vast chunks of the left, however defined, are quite prepared to leave the Kosovars and the KLA to their fate.

Paul Greenaway
Sussex

Missing the point

I notice that in the EPSR No999 (May 19), Royston Bull tells his readers how “one Trot scribbler in the Weekly Worker has decided to end the ‘left’ middle class dilemma of being for the Albanian KLA ‘self-determination struggle’ but against their Nato imperialist allies by declaring the west’s barbaric onslaught on tiny Serbia to be a ‘progressive’ historical development by ‘democratic’ imperialism” (original emphasis).

This is a reference to the May 13 edition of the Weekly Worker. Well, I have scoured this issue and nowhere can I find a scribbler, of any political coloration, making such a comment. I am not aware of any left group describing the Nato air war as “progressive”, even if you take into account some of the more extreme ‘first campist’ utterances you can sometimes find in Workers’ Liberty. Would Royston Bull kindly oblige and send us proof for his statement? Exactly who said it: when, where and in what context? All in the interests of dispassionate and objective journalism of course.

Danny Hammill
South London

Merseyside Socialist Party

Reports of the death of the Socialist Party in Merseyside have been greatly exaggerated (Weekly Worker May 13). Contrary to your article, the Socialist Party did indeed stand a candidate in the local elections - Peter Glover, who stood in Orrell Ward in Bootle.

The 14.13% of the vote scored by Dave Flynn in Litherland, Bootle, for the SLP was not the highest proportion of the vote in Merseyside. In fact, the vote of our candidate, who won 14.6% of the vote was the biggest success of any left candidate in the Mersey basin. The SLP vote was indeed encouraging, based as it is on the work done over the years by the Socialist Party in Bootle, especially by our candidate, Peter Glover, who stood as a parliamentary candidate for the area.

Thank you for allowing me to set the record straight.

Editor’s note: We apologise for the error. However, it could have been avoided, had Socialist Party HQ not refused our request for information regarding its local election results.

James McCabe
Merseyside

So simple

I noted with amusement Jack Conrad’s facetious comment (Weekly Worker May 13) that socialists who are making political demands under capitalism (eg, for a capitalist federal republic) should logically reject working class demands for higher pay on the grounds that they are for the abolition of wage labour.

The wages struggle is a bread and butter issue which workers are forced to be involved in simply because we are in a society where you must get money to survive. As Marx put it in Wages, price and profit, “By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital [the wages struggle] workers would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement … [but] they ought not to forget they are fighting with the effects but not with the cause of those effects.” The only solution to workers’ problems under capitalism was: “The abolition of the wages system!”

So whilst of necessity workers had to engage in the economic struggle for survival under capitalism, politically they should struggle for the revolutionary establishment of socialism.

Those who argue for political demands falling short of the abolition of capitalism such as the establishment of a republic are essentially reformists who believe workers are simply unable to understand the basic case for socialism and the abolition of capitalism. They have to be led by clever intellectuals like Jack Conrad.

There is a simple choice. You either urge workers to make reformist demands under capitalism or you encourage them to abolish it. You cannot do both. People are not stupid. If they understand the need to scrap capitalism, why are they going to support reforms to improve it and make it more democratic?

All these very lengthy articles arguing for the need to make political demands under capitalism in order to make workers aware of all the issues and help form them into a new ruling class represent time and effort which could have been used to make the basic case for socialism. By choosing that approach, Jack Conrad and the CPGB are objectively supporting the continuation of capitalism and are doing nothing else but try to manoeuvre for a position of power and influence within it.

Andrew Northall
Northants

Anarcho May

Your account of the origins of May Day (Weekly Worker April 29) reminds me of those photographs of the Bolsheviks in which Stalin appears, where his political opponents - Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc - have been tippexed out of the picture.

The events that established May Day as an international day of action did not directly involve the shooting of workers at the McCormick Harvester works in 1886, although this set the scene for the events to come. By the way, Mary Godwin is wrong - accounts are confused, some saying at least two were killed, but at the most four workers were shot by the police and not the six claimed by Godwin.

The events that established May Day happened later in the evening at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Here a crowd addressed by anarchist speakers protested against police violence. This was broken up by the police. In the following confusion, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one outright and fatally wounding six others. Evidence came to light later that the bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed by the police.

As a result four anarchists were hanged (some of whom had not even been at the meeting) and another escaped the noose by committing suicide the day before the execution.

It is these events and these militants - the Chicago martyrs - which are generally regarded to have led to the enshrinement of May 1 as an international day of action. The “martyred dead” of the song ‘The red flag’ refers to those of Chicago.

I do hope that Mary Godwin - brought up on another occasion over her lack of assiduity in the subject of history - has not deliberately written out the key role of anarchists in the history of May Day for purely partisan purposes.

Nathan South
London

Whose life?

It took a flight across the Atlantic to show me how tightly concerted capitalist propagandists are, and I would like to detail it for you. When I left Toronto the Globe and Mail was running a picture of Clinton gravely listening to the woes of an Albanian peasant; also a story of a Canadian doctor prosecuted for lethally injecting a cancer patient. I arrived to find the so-called Independent with a picture of Blair gravely listening to another Albanian peasant, and a story about an English doctor who … etc, etc.

I know little about the rent-a-peasant business, but have worked long enough in the medical world to recognise that the cancer-death issue - if it is an issue at all - has been got up as a distraction. For centuries it has been taken for granted that doctors will use their common sense when dealing with terminal agony.

Take the case of Freud in 1939, for example. After a dozen painful operations to trim back a cancer of nose and throat, after using the borrowed time to write a final brilliant book, he observed that his dog no longer recognised him. He called his personal physician, explained that the time had come, and received a terminal heavy dose of morphine. Nobody debated or protested the manner of his end. The doctor neither hid nor publicised his action. This common-sense approach was, then, normal practice. Are there any among us who, when faced with certain doom, would not wish our doctors to use their skill to allow us a dignified exit?

This non-issue is packaged under the label ‘sanctity of life’ whenever ‘life’ is being outraged by unemployment, massacre and famine. The inquisition prided itself on never violating the sanctity of heretic lives. They passed their victims to the secular authorities, then absolved the ensuing murders.

Consider the fate of a man who has been required to work in asbestos dust in order to feed his family. Now he has lung cancer and is slowly choking to death. Shall his doctor be forbidden to speed his end? After 20 years of life have been stolen from him, officious idealists attempt to compensate him with 20 more days of unnecessary agony. They would prosecute a merciful doctor sooner than a careless employer.

With honourable exceptions, like your paper, we do not see many stories in the press about the cancers from industrial dirt. The professional indignants of the bourgeois media resemble hound dogs. They will follow a trail - after being given a glove to smell. And who decides the glove of the week?

John Blakiston
Cambridge