Letters

Shortcomings

How interesting. Comrade Alan Fox writes an article detailing the all too obvious shortcomings of the anarchists’ ‘Carnival against capitalism’ - and of anarchist ideology in general (Weekly Worker June 24).

For his efforts, comrade Fox is accused by Phil Rudge of “delivering a Marxist sermon”, and for good measure is damned for being “a puritanical moralising philistine” (Letters, July 1). Rather than comrade Fox being “prissy”, it is more the case that Phil Rudge is being rather cavalier with the truth. It is a plain fact that many of those who attended the ‘carnival’ were drunk, some of them determined from the outset to start a ruck and go on a vandalism spree. Why be afraid to openly say it?

All riots, virtually by definition, are spontaneous outbursts - not conscious acts. All rioters, by definition, are motivated to a greater or lesser extent by the desire for personal revenge. Sometimes by the desire to ‘liberate’ from the nearest shop a few expensive stereos or wide-screen televisions. How can this turn the working class into a ruling class?

But I forget. Phil Rudge objects to what he calls the ‘we Marxists know best’ line of the CPGB. However, if he can name others who know better than “we Marxists”, then logically the CPGB - and all the other left organisations - should immediately liquidate themselves in order to follow and ‘learn’.

Eddie Ford
Middlesex

Serious approach

Anne Murphy seems to find it particularly irksome that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is able to cooperate on the basic issue of trade union rights with Arthur Scargill and co (Weekly Worker June 17).

I will return to this point, but first I must point out that she has missed a division in the SLP (not something one would expect from the Weekly Worker). Anne attacks Hendy and Crow and lumps their approach in with Scargill’s. Hendy and Crow are too focused on the TUC: they wrongly argue that only by winning the TUC over can the anti-union laws be repealed. Scargill’s approach is the total opposite. At last year’s United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws AGM Scargill argued that we should never let the TUC near the campaign.

Of course none of the SLP leadership share the AWL’s drive to build a militant rank and file movement across the unions. It is no secret that our comrades in the RMT fight for such a policy and regularly criticise Crow’s feeble leadership. Does this rule out working with the SLP in a united campaign to repeal the anti-union laws and support workers in struggle? No, it should not. Only 10 years ago Stalinists in the British unions, including the forerunners of the CPGB, the Leninists, would not have worked with Trotskyists. We have always proposed such unity in action, even if it is new to those from the Stalinist tradition.

Anne also attacks the AWL for our position on the structure of the campaign. Anne supports the few delegates who wanted political parties and broad lefts to gain voting rights. I presume the CPGB’s support for this idea is not unconnected with the fact they were unable to get a single delegate to the AGM from a trade union branch, trades council or strike committee.

Of course support from anyone should be welcome, but if the campaign is to be a real force, it needs to be based on basic class struggle organisations. Any serious socialist organisation should aim to win support in the unions, should fight to win affiliation to the campaign and get delegated, but should one individual socialist get the same vote as a delegate from a workplace union representing thousands of workers?

Anne quotes Lee Rock, who argued that the SWP needed to be allowed to get involved as the SWP. I would like SWP members to get involved as representatives of the union branches where they have influence. But if branches of the SWP, SLP or whoever were able to outvote union delegates it would discredit the campaign in the eyes of most trade union activists.

Affiliation by union broad lefts is also problematic. Unions often have many broad lefts: it is not the campaign’s job to pick and choose. However, any broad left that has a real base in a union should be able to win branch affiliations, or even donations where union rules are restrictive, and send delegates through, not outside, union structures. The campaign also gives places on its committee to official and unofficial strike committees.

I think this is a serious approach to the real situation in the British workers’ movement.

Mark Sandell
AWL

Unionist veto

It is interesting and disturbing to note that Jack Conrad supports the right of protestant (British-Irish) self-determination (Weekly Worker July 1). To my knowledge this is a new position for the CPGB and highlights the danger of posing the right of self-determination in an abstract, formal manner.

If the Protestants have the right of self-determination, does that not necessarily imply that they have the democratic right to decide to remain a part of the UK? If so, the armed struggle of the IRA to win a united Ireland and end the unionist veto can be viewed as anti-democratic, since it is obvious that the British-Irish do not want to separate from the UK. Indeed you could go further and support the struggle of the loyalist paramilitaries in their fight against forced incorporation into a united Ireland (while of course criticising their sectarian tendencies). It may be necessary to raise the slogan of ‘Arm the UDA’ and denounce British imperialism for refusing to recognise protestant self-determination.

We would have to warn the British-Irish not to trust the UK state to protect their right to govern themselves. Look what they did to Stormont. The lack of a written constitution guaranteeing the British-Irish self-determination would be seen as a form of oppression that communists must denounce.

Jim Baxter
Glasgow

Any answers, WP?

Mark Fischer’s critique on how Workers Power radically and inexplicably changed its electoral line is entirely valid (Weekly Worker July 1). As a former WP activist I would like to put further questions:

For around 25 years WP and its international tendency (the LRCI) have always voted Labour. June 10 is the first time they have called for a vote against Labour. What is the difference with the past? Does it mean that they have now also ceased to vote for Swedish, French, German and Austrian social democrats?

Why did the LRCI, which is based within the EU, not adopt a single joint resolution or organise a single joint campaign with regard to the only international elections in which most of their sections have ever participated?

Are they going to repeat the same anti-Labour line in future elections, and if not, why not? WP called on workers to spoil their ballot papers in nine of the 12 UK constituencies. Why did they call for a vote for Alternative Labour in East Midlands and against this same force in Yorkshire and Humberside?

In Coventry, when Dave Nellist achieved more than 40% in a local election (1994) and five percent in the general election (1997), WP campaigned against him and for Labour, saying that they preferred to be with the reformist workers than to back a centrist sect. This time in the same area WP voted against Labour and a more popular Labour dissident (Oddy achieved 4.34% in West Midlands), and for Nellist who only obtained 0.85%. Why?

Why did they not participate at all in the building of the Socialist Alliances?

Why did they refuse to vote for the SLP on the grounds of their positions on the war? Yet they also refused to vote for the CPGB, who were closer to them on the war than other people - like a certain former Labour MEP who supported Nato.

H Johnson
LCMRCI

Anti-Craig

In his latest plunging the depths of Kautskyite apologetics (‘Trotsky versus left Trotskyists’ Weekly Worker July 1), Dave Craig does little more than conjure up vivid images of arses and elbows.

Apparently, in the fantasy world of comrade Craig, Lenin wrote What is to be done? as a critique of centrists in the RSDLP who were content with existing bourgeois democracy in tsarist Russia. It escaped not one of Lenin’s contemporaries (no matter how dim-witted) that Russia circa 1902 had nothing approximating bourgeois democracy.

I have to ask Dave (for the umpteenth time), what is this ‘democracy in general’, as distinct from ‘bourgeois democracy in particular’? We know that for Lenin (at least from his April thesis onwards) ‘democracy in general’ is the mendacious phrase of the liberal out to fool the workers. Whereas Lenin, after February 1917, never forgot to counterpose bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, Dave, yet again, calls for a blurring of the two. This is sheer Kautskyism.

Tom Delargy
Paisley

Nothing less

I would like to make some additional comments to comrade Dave Craig’s generally admirable defence of revolutionary democracy (‘Trotsky versus the left Trotskyists’ Weekly Worker July 1).

The comrade is quite right to mock the views of Barry Biddulph on this subject. The latter’s continued insistence that the views of the CPGB/RDG are “Kautsky-ite”, and that the call for a federal republic makes “a cult of formal structures”, is an extreme example of the very burnt kettle calling the scrubbed clean pot black.

As Barry loves to point out, Kautsky contrasted “democracy” to “dictatorship”. Yet surely Barry does exactly the same - only in reverse. He counterposes, in the most artificially stageist way, the “workers’ republic” to the federal republic, and democracy in toto to socialism in toto. It seems to me that Barry is an inverted or ultra-leftist Kautskyite.

We can see the essential absurdity, and ultra-formalism, of his methodology in his most recent letter to the Weekly Worker (June 24). He writes: “If The Observer calls for the federal republic, that’s bourgeois, but if the CPGB calls for it, it becomes proletarian.” Yes, Barry, exactly. The Huttonites want a controlled removal from above of the constitutional monarchy, which (they hope) will usher in a bourgeois, presidential-type system. The CPGB wants the revolutionary democratic removal from below of the constitutional-monarchical system and its replacement by organs of workers’ power. Perhaps I am being a bit dim, but that sounds like all the difference in the world to me.

Danny Hammill
South London