Letters
Arthur knows
Surely it can’t be such a bourgeois concept as electoral rivalry which has led the Weekly Worker and its newly designed website to focus all its wrath on the SLP and Scargill? Space which could be used for valid criticism of the SLP is wasted in invective and insinuation. The terms “red-brown socialism”, “national socialism”, “little Englander” - “Pol Potism” even - are flung about without any regard to the validity of such terms.
Whatever Scargill’s faults, nationalism is not one of them. His internationalism is above reproach, both as an NUM leader and a socialist. Nor do claims about his “Stalinism” wash with those who know him or have worked with him, unless that term is used in a vernacular, unMarxist way just to denote bureaucratic methods of working and centralised decision-making. But “Stalinism” as a historical phenomenon denotes much more. It should not be used in the same debased way that the left also sometimes uses the term ‘fascism’.
Neither is the SLP describable as a Stalinist organisation. Arthur is well aware of the historic failure of the ‘communist’ parties. He also knows that any association with Stalinism would kill any credibility the SLP has in the British working class and particularly the trade unions. He also knows what Brar’s game is. Unfortunately, Arthur, being naive and trusting, and not a good judge of character (eg, Roger Windsor), may be too lulled by Brar’s personable nature into a false confidence that he can use Brar, or rather Brar’s ‘power base’ in the Indian Workers Association, and then part company with his embarrassing sycophants. The problem is, by that time, will there be anyone left in the SLP except Stalinists?
Arthur can get shot of Brar any time, quite constitutionally, with ample evidence of his self-avowed entryism. Politics, like comedy, is all a matter of timing. Unfortunately it is not a foregone conclusion who will have the last laugh in this case.
The truth missed by the Weekly Worker is that the hard-line Stalinist element is still a minority in the SLP, despite its control of Spark and Women for Socialism. Some of this minority are amiable crackpots like Dave Coates. Few, apart from Brar, have any articulate replies to even the most basic criticism aimed at them by working class members.
Arthur does want to build the SLP. He does want the liberal socialists like John Hendy and Victoria Brittain in the party, and realises that he has to keep the Stalinist skeleton locked in the cupboard. He also sees the need to recruit youth, and knows that Spark is about as scintillating as reading the pig-iron figures of a five-year plan.
Delphi shares the Weekly Worker’s interest in exposing Stalinism in the SLP. You because you want to wreck the SLP, and I because I want it to survive and build on its massive potential. Criticism, however, must be based on analysis and not on the supposed subjective motives of Scargill. Examine that fundamental contradiction: the reliance Scargill is apparently placing on the Brarites, versus his declared aim of building a mass working class party, free from the baggage of past failures.
Someone who has played a leading role in the NUM, first at regional and then at national level for 30 years, has bound to have picked up a few lessons in outmanoeuvring the opposition. Scargill has also demonstrated his readiness to break completely with those who do not share his vision of the SLP. A few more cuckoos will not go amiss from the nest. More importantly, he has shown his ability to tune into ordinary working class people.
In comparison, Brar is an amateur intriguer playing at being an international proletarian revolutionary. Whether his clique is anything more sinister, only history will reveal. What history has already shown is that his ossified Stalinist world view has nothing to offer humanity. Scargill may play to the crowd at IWA meetings, but he is not ready to take up the poisoned chalice offered him by Brar and swallow the draft of ‘Marxist-Leninist science’ (1936 vintage, Uncle Joe’s Lubyanka cellar).
Delphi
Absurd
“... the only way to realise bourgeois democracy is through establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Bourgeois democracy is expressed through the dictatorship of the proletariat ...”
What is this? The generation of a set of random Marxist phrases by some maliciously designed computer program? No, just comrade Phil Sharpe writing in the Weekly Worker (May 27).
If we accept, as comrade Sharpe does, that the principal and diametrically opposed combatants in the class war are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, how can we then arrive at the conclusion that a task of proletarian rule is to establish bourgeois democracy? We cannot. Our job is to enshrine the revolutionary democracy of the majority, not the ‘rights’ of the exploiters.
But of course comrade Sharpe is not thinking of the rights of the capitalists. For him “bourgeois democracy” is needed to safeguard peasant interests. It has nothing to do with the bourgeoisie, who, he knows, are incapable of pursuing the “bourgeois democratic revolution”.
Surely, in view of this, sophisticated Marxists such as comrade Sharpe need to consider whether categories like ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ and ‘bourgeois democratic tasks’ serve to explain reality or act to obscure.
Such fixed categories did not originate with Marx, but with Second International theorists after his death. Misunderstanding his historical analysis of the development of capitalism, they held that the stages Marx elaborated - slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism - must be those that every society had to pass through. Thus Menshevism, with its belief that Russia had to endure a prolonged period of capitalism ruled over by a capitalist class, was but the logical outcome of ‘orthodox Marxist’ misinterpretation of Marx. Lenin accepted the categories, but fortunately filled them with revolutionary content.
The tragedy is that those who are still trapped in the same web of erroneous categories nearly a century later are driven by the logic of their usage along a path that has proved to be just as much a dead end as that of the Mensheviks - economism. For example, because for comrade Sharpe “the bourgeois democratic revolution has become either obsolete or a secondary question” in the advanced capitalist countries, there is no need to take up questions of democracy at all. “The monarchy is not primarily a survival of feudalism,” he lectures us, “and is instead integral to the modern bourgeois state.” As if the CPGB wanted to smash the monarchy in order to complete comrade Sharpe’s “bourgeois democratic revolution”!
It is precisely because the monarchy is “integral to the modern bourgeois state” that we want to mobilise workers around the democratic demand of ditching this mainstay of the British constitutional order. Let the bourgeoisie attempt to defend the indefensible, while workers organise against the state. Should they do this using revolutionary democratic forms and methods - workers’ councils or soviets - they will be well placed to take their struggle towards proletarian power.
Peter Manson
London
RDG backing
The Revolutionary Democratic Group has decided unanimously to support the ‘Weekly Worker’ Euro-election campaign. The group has agreed to give £500 for a deposit to sponsor one of the 20 candidates on the Euro slate. We urge others on the revolutionary left to do the same. It is important that we put an alternative to Blair’s imperialist Europe and Arthur Scargill’s little Englander nationalism.
The working class will find the answer to its own and society’s problems by taking up the struggle for democracy in a revolutionary way. The present imperialist war teaches the same lesson. The struggle of the people of Kosova for self-determination and independence is a revolutionary and democratic struggle in opposition to the policies of Milosevic, Clinton and Blair. It must not be separated from the revolutionary and democratic interests of the Serbian working class. The reactionary policies of the Milosevic regime in Kosova are paralleled with the suppression of democracy and the working class in Serbia.
For us the main enemy is at home in our own kingdom. Our fight is against US-Euro imperialism and its bombing of Serbian workers, and its refusal to arm the KLA. Our own constitutional monarchist state has proved once again to be the backbone of the most reactionary policies.
We urge ‘Weekly Worker’ to take up the arguments for a federal republic and make this one of the central slogans of the campaign. This was dropped from the programme in order to make an agreement with the SWP. Now that the SWP have again proved so weak and failed to stand up to Blair and Scargill, it should be reinstated as one of the central slogans of the ‘Weekly Worker’ anti-imperialist election campaign.
Revolutionary Democratic Group
General strike
On May 21 the Basque Country came to a standstill in a general strike.
The strike, which was supported by the four main trade union federations demanded the introduction of a 35-hour week - an important objective of European trade unions, with the French and Italian governments being forced to agree to it.
The reason for its importance is clear: today in the EU we have 20 million unemployed, with five million in Germany, three million in France, and three million in Spain. The left must demand the immediate introduction of the 35-hour week with no exceptions, and no loss of pay. The Spanish employers say they ‘can’t afford’ such a measure. This in a situation where they have been making record profits; this in a situation where, since 1993, the stock market has gone up by 125%!
As Friday morning dawned, it was clear that not many people were heeding the employers’ call to “work as normal”. Although the media did their best to find some strike-breaking “heroes” they did not have much success. By 6am thousands of pickets were in place, not only outside the factories and offices, but in all the main roads across the city. In San Sebastian, Vitoria, Bilbao, and a dozen smaller cities workers were seen directing traffic and communicating with each other by mobile phone.
The response of the Basque police varied a lot from area to area. In some places they more or less stood by, knowing it was after all only one day. In other areas they were tooled up and looking for a fight, with at least 20 pickets needing hospital treatment.
By 10am pickets were doing the rounds in the city centres, reminding any shops and bars that had opened that they should be closed. At noon the demonstrations started, with more than 50,000 people taking part in demonstrations throughout the day.
One of the most positive things about this strike was that it was supported by all the trade union federations. The greatest source of weakness in the Basque trade union movement is the chronic division between the nationalists and those that exist in the whole of Spain. In this context it is disgraceful that the trade union leaders refused to hold joint demonstrations, preferring to maintain this division. In Bilbao, for example, both demonstrations assembled at the same time and at the same place. Both then set off to march, by different routes, around the city.
Despite this, May 21 can only be seen as a big success. It is only the first step in what will probably be a long fight against government and employers, in the Basque country and across Spain. The trade unions should set a date for a general strike in Spain as a whole.
Jim Padmore
Vitoria, Spain
‘Jury’ abolished
The press has carried a little of the furore over Blair’s ongoing attacks upon disability benefits and his intention to rob thousands of claimants of their entitlements by introducing means-testing. What is slipping by meantime without apparent comment or protest is the right to independent appeal against wrong decisions made by the DHSS on all and any benefit entitlement.
The independent tribunal is at present composed of two lay members, usually drawn from the trade union movement, voluntary sector, board of trade, etc and a lawyer acting as chair.
The last government and this one had made its dislike of the appeal system well known. Tribunals very often overturn the decisions of the DHSS and give people back their benefit entitlements. To combat this, major changes were made to restrict the area of discretion and judgement used in reviewing people’s claims. Undoubtedly this caused more people to lose benefits than previously, but still more often than not tribunals have been finding in favour of claimants and restoring people’s benefits.
Suddenly and without any widespread discussion or debate, the system of independent review will be abolished in October of this year, and instead of a tribunal ‘jury’, we will have simply a lawyer sitting alone.
This is equivalent to the abolishing of a jury in the court and serves the same effect - to greatly undermine the chances of the claimant getting a fair and balanced review of their case. The class prejudice and social position of the lawyer will without doubt swing heavily against the claimant.
Dave Douglass
Doncaster
No platform
While commenting on The Guardian’s decision to print a letter from the BNP’s publicity officer (Weekly Worker May 20), Eddie Ford expresses his alarm that the SWP does not believe that the BNP should have been given letter space. Presumably, Mr Ford believes the BNP has a ‘democratic right’ to publish its views - if he believes this, he should ask himself what he is doing in an organisation that calls itself communist.
The Nazis are the razor of the class enemy and in times of crisis can become a threat of absolute critical importance to the life or death of the labour movement. For that reason all socialists must adopt a position of total no platform for fascists, from leaflets through doors to marches, to letters in The Guardian. Any attempt by the fascists to operate politically must be smashed by working class militants. This does not mean state bans, which would, of course, be used as sharply against the left as they would the right - what it means is organised working class self-defence against any form of fascist threat. It means our democracy - not theirs.
Does Mr Ford really believe in the democratic rights of the BNP to operate? Perhaps he should invite John Tyndall to debate the question at this year’s Communist University? After all, Royston Bull, an organised homophobe, is already invited - why not an organised racist? You could even send the results of your discussion to The Guardian.
Danny O’Sullivan
Cardiff
Clear proof
Your correspondent Danny Hammill (Weekly Worker May 27) doubts that the EPSR could have correctly quoted “one Trot scribbler in the Weekly Worker” (May 13) declaring that the Nato air war was “a ‘progressive’ historical development by ‘democratic’ imperialism”.
He adds: “I have scoured this issue and nowhere can I find a scribbler, of any political coloration, making such a comment.”
The last two paragraphs on page seven of that issue state the following:
“‘Imperialism is as much our ‘mortal’ enemy as is capitalism. That is so … No Marxist will forget, however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism, and that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it is not every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism’ (VI Lenin ‘A caricature of Marxism and imperialist economism’ CW Vol 23, p63). And today we should not support the venal Serb bureaucratic/mafia proto-bourgeoisie in its struggle against ‘democratic’ imperialism to re-establish the reactionary Serbian medieval myth of Kosova and carve a Greater Serbian state out of the living body of the Albanian people. This is a reactionary struggle against imperialism par excellence.”
Albeit quoting Lenin ludicrously inappropriately, this article clearly implies that the Nato blitzkrieg is a “progressive” act by “democratic” imperialism against “medieval Serbian reaction”, exactly as the EPSR reported it.
Since his letter is headlined ‘Missing the point’, it seems that not just supporters are confused about the Weekly Worker’s contents, but the editors too.
Royston Bull
Stockport
Scandalous
As an ex-member of the CPGB (1968), I feel morally compelled to let you know I consider your Party’s stand concerning Yugoslavia as scandalous, anti-communist and acting as objective allies of Nato and imperialism.
Alexander Moumbaris
Paris