Letters

London mayor

Urgent message for Phil Rudge - you have nothing to lose but the “material boundaries” of your comfy armchair! (Letters Weekly Worker November 11).

Out there in the very real material world, Phil, thousands - perhaps even millions - have been disgusted by the petty, anti-democratic vendetta conducted by the Blairites against ‘Red Ken’. The support being generated for his bid to become London mayor has the potential to humiliate the Blairite leadership, maybe even split the London Labour Party. Most surely a “living manifesto”, which communists and socialists should take an energetic part in helping to shape and push in a revolutionary democratic direction.

But not our Phil. He is aghast at such politics, which for him represent the emergence of a “new world without principle”. Instead Phil hankers after the certainties of his ‘old world with principle’. But our good comrade is perfectly entitled of course to luxuriate in his ‘principles’. On his own. In his armchair.

Eddie Ford
Middlesex

No change

The CPGB’s ‘policy flip’ on Livingstone exists entirely in comrade Michael Farmer’s head (Letters Weekly Worker November 11).

As a Leninist, not ultra-left organisation, the CPGB has always had a policy of critically supporting and encouraging left splits from Labour - not to mention an active engagement with all genuinely progressive and democratic movements in society as a whole. What has changed?

Presumably comrade Farmer thinks the CPGB should have ignored or condemned the Socialist Labour Party from birth, told the Socialist Alliances to take a running jump, refused to collaborate or work with Militant/Socialist Party, etc. All these organisations originated in some shape or form from some variety of Labourism. Comrade Farmer implies that the CPGB should also be indifferent as to whether ‘Red Ken’ or Dobbo secures the Labour nomination for London mayor - and to who actually ends up becoming mayor.

This is not serious politics. It is a bit distressing to learn that the height of comrade Farmer’s ambition is for the CPGB to become a permanently irrelevant sect - along with all the rest. Just what the working class needs.

John Dart
Bristol

British-Irish

I have been following the ‘British-Irish’ debate with its constant cycle of thesis/antithesis, in which Conrad’s narrative stands counterposed to that of his critics. A recurring theme catches my attention - ie, the ease in which unionists are re-labelled ‘British-Irish’ and repackaged as a kind of misunderstood population, neglecting the sinister aspects that have shrouded their state security system and all its machinations.

The ‘British-Irish’ label is a disguise to hide the inadequacy of socialism to re-emerge from partition as a unifying factor. It symbolises the retreat from socialist aims by each respective community as the hunt for the ‘national question’ took hold. Things got polarised - Catholics are equated with nationalism and protestants with unionism; black/white distinctions seem to be possible - the ‘them against us’ syndrome. Politicians were thrown up who claimed to represent each community or religion, not class.

On a final point, in the Weekly Worker (November 11), it is noted by your correspondent that “[Billy Hutchinson] was a good speaker and went down well with the audience” - this is vintage Hutchinson as ‘one of the lads’. I wonder, did any of the audience think to question the credentials of this self-professed ‘socialist’, and ask basically what tenet of Marxism could lead a person to become the apologist for a gang of cut-throats, who kill catholic working people. The ironic thing is that he has got away with it for so long.

Pat Carlin
Derry

Nationalists

A principled and consistent position on the national question, imperialism and democratic rights appears to be beyond the abilities of Gerry Downing, John Stone, et al (Weekly Worker November 18).

Argentinean dictator Galtieri’s invasion of the Falkland Island brought him into conflict with British imperialism. Ergo, viva Galtieri! Presumably the democratic rights of the “2,000 Kelpers” were immaterial.

Perhaps the comrades could explain how this motley band of sheep farmers clinging to a storm-lashed rock deny the Argentine people their nationhood? The only principled position for Marxists during the Falklands war was revolutionary defeatism and self-determination for the Falkland Islanders. Anything else is surely nationalist crap.

The comrades “hope the CPGB will re-examine its position” on the KLA. We have always been clear that our support for this petty-bourgeois nationalist army is critical. As was our view - and support - of the IRA. The KLA were fighting a democratic war of national liberation. Within the disputed territory there is (or was) a Serbian (oppressor?) minority. Like us, Gerry, John, et al are concerned at the expulsion of this minority: ie, the reversal of the poles of oppression. Strangely their concern does not extend to the (oppressor) community of Northern Ireland. There’s consistent democracy for you.

Andy Hannah
South London

Withdrawal

It seems you are once again getting your collective leftist knickers in a twist over the national question: to wit your ‘British-Irish’ debate. Perhaps I may be of assistance.

The root cause of your problem lies in your unyielding allegiance to the ‘right of self-determination of peoples’. This abstract right rapidly becomes nonsensical on any close examination.

First, we have to look at what a nation is: despite some of your comrades enumerating Stalin’s symptomatic approach, I think the question has never been adequately addressed in your columns. Substantively, we could define the nation as being the extent of the domination of a hegemonic elite: the extent to which one ‘selected tradition’ is accepted among a group of people, based on the material control of the means of communication and transport, backed up with - and this is an important part - a monopoly of the means of violence by the dominant group. Hence, it has been rightly said that the state makes the nation, not the nation the state.

In other words, a nation is the extent of the domain of the ruling class, the demarcation of their natural and human property resources. Thus, self-determination for a people simply becomes the self-determination of the ruling class of that people - no one living under a master can have self-determination, regardless of whether that master shares a language, a skin tone or a religion with them. In supporting national self-determination, you are simply supporting the right of the ruling class to rule.

Instead of the abstracted right of self-determination for a people, you should be supporting self-determination of people, which in the current state of the world can only be synonymous with socialism itself. Before, in your letter columns, I called for a working class withdrawal from Britain, and I was serious. Likewise I would call for a working class withdrawal from Ireland. The business of drawing lines on maps, of allocating areas for our masters to rule, is not our business. The nation state is simply a unit of property. We are the opponents of property, so we should oppose nationalism, in all its varied forms.

Bill Martin
SPGB

False radicalism

In general one would be in favour of protests against US imperialism, such as the recent anti-Clinton riots that were apparently organised by the Greek Communist Party, since the US is the most powerful and hegemonic of the enemies of the world’s working class.

However, US imperialism is not the only enemy of the working class internationally, and the particular motives for the KKE’s action are something I am more than a little suspicious of. Some would think that such an action, which I understand was primarily a protest against Nato’s war against Serbia over Kosova (and thus a continuation of the movement that erupted during the actual war), is in some way reflective of a qualitatively superior radicalism of the Greek left in comparison with other countries, where the anti-war mobilisations were much smaller.

However, I think this is an illusion, and in mobilising against the Americans in this particular context, the Greek Stalinists are in fact acting as chauvinist spokespersons for their own ruling class, and not opponents of capitalism and imperialism at all. Not that there is anything unusual about that for Stalinists, of course, right from the days when the American CP cheered for the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the French CP leader Thorez called on every Frenchman to ‘get a Kraut’ at the end of the last world war.

Key to this today in the Greek context is the Macedonian question, which for Greek nationalists is very explosive, and goes to the root of the stability of the Greek state. The coming into existence of an independent Macedonia caused apoplexy in Greece, because the historic territory of ancient ‘Macedonia’ includes wide areas of Greece, including the major city of Salonika. Greek nationalists have historically denied the existence of the Macedonians as a people (the Macedonians being a Slavic people who speak a language that appears to be basically a dialect of Bulgarian, but who tend to regard themselves as a separate people from the Bulgarians).

The break-up of Yugoslavia meant that Yugoslavia’s Macedonian republic became a separate state - and the Greeks successfully blocked with the Serbian government in bullying Macedonia into not using ‘Macedonia’ as the name of their state. So now you have a small independent state in the Balkans that is internationally and officially known by the peculiar name of ‘FYROM’, which is an acronym for ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’.

The Greek government’s squalid little alliance with Serbia is at the root of the protests organised by the Greek Stalinists - the reasoning being that anything that weakens Serbia also weakens Greece. They are not directed against US imperialism (Greece is in fact a full member of Nato itself), but against ... Macedonia. This is the chauvinist and reactionary motivation behind the pseudo-’anti-imperialist’ demonstrations in Athens.

Ian Donovan
London

DSP mote

Weekly Worker readers could be forgiven for thinking Australia’s Democratic Socialist Party a crude economist sect like the (Cliffite) International Socialist Organisation or (Stalinist) Communist Party of Australia - if they are only going on Marcus Larsen’s misrepresentation of our politics vis-à-vis the republic referendum: “We don’t need to act around constitutional issues, goes their refrain, as they do not concern workplace pay and conditions” (Weekly Worker November 11).

I can’t speak for the ISO or CPA, but maybe Weekly Worker readers would like to see just what the DSP was really saying (including how we criticised the ISO and CPA). You can read our various statements about the republic referendum farce and make up your own mind.

Larsen’s articles being lampooned? How about removing the mote from your own eye first?

Ben Courtice
Melbourne

Website purge

It is a sad irony that Karl Marx should have been voted ‘thinker of the millennium’ in a BBC poll just as his portrait was being removed from the CPGB’s internet website.

The poll result comes as no surprise, but its significance should not be underestimated. The signs have been present for some time that the bourgeois intelligentsia would like to ‘poach’ Marx. The ‘end of history’ theories with their brash assertion that ‘this is where it has all been leading’ are widely recognised as unsatisfactory. They lack motivatory force. Human beings are not going to be easily mobilised for realising the survival struggles of capital by the assurance that heaven on earth has arrived, that we are living in paradise. Marx minus the working class on the other hand - the relegation of communism to a utopia - has potential.

The trashing of communism is rarely the starting point of astute bourgeois ideologues. ‘Communism is a good idea, but ...’ is far more useful. Marx after all is famous for praising the progressive character of capitalism and, as to rendering Marx a safe reformist, well, the foundations of that work had already been laid down earlier this century by leading ‘Marxists’, before the ‘aberration’ of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. What better weapon against Lenin could there be than ... Marx!

It is nothing less than tragic then to witness the CPGB handing Marx on a plate to the capitalists. Without a word of explanation, the pictures of Marx and of Lenin have been expunged from the Party website and replaced by some innocuous pop art symbols. I anticipate the riposte that symbols are unimportant, that it is the politics that matter. This would be unconvincing for two reasons.

Firstly, and obviously, it would be merely a response to my opposition to a change and, as such a deliberate evasion of the duty to explain the reasons for that change. The pictures of Marx and Lenin had been prominent on the opening page of the website since its inception. I am not going to accept that this fact had merely accidental status or significance.

Secondly, it is a fact that the liquidatory process, or - to give it one of its current euphemisms - ‘modernisation’, usually starts with the exorcism of symbols, then proceeds to the exorcism of names, and finally to the expungement of the concepts. I sincerely hope that this process is not what we are witnessing in the CPGB, an organisation I am proud to be a supporter of.

I have wracked my brain to try to guess what alternative explanation there might be. All I can come up with is ... lack of supervision. Perhaps there is a laissez faire attitude from the organisations of the whole Party towards the products of assignments to individual comrades or groups of comrades. This theory is maybe strengthened by the absence of explanation of the change on the website itself, or in any other Party organ I have seen.

It is clear that we face a struggle to retain Marx for the working class, and to use Marx, and his most accomplished realisers, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as indispensable tools in making the working class. It should be equally clear that the restoration of the portraits of Marx and Lenin to the worldwide banner and organ of the Communist Party is an essential element of the affirmation of that task.

George Brooks
Stockport