Letters

SWP and LSA

There was much to commend what Alan Thomas had to say in his letter in reply to Lucy Grantz (Weekly Worker March 16).

Lucy, fortunately not all Socialist Workers Party members think with as little political foresight as I believe you have displayed. Differing levels of political consciousness do exist within our party. Heresy of heresy, some SWP members may see further than the ends of Socialist Worker sales and recruits to the party. We can all see that the altered political situation within Britain has been the starting point for leftwing organisational unity. And clearly the London Socialist Alliance has put real socialist unity on the agenda.

Rather than "obliterating" the rest of the left, I believe the SWP has a key role in cementing and perpetuating the united front of the LSA. This can be achieved concretely at this time by allocating seats on the top-up list to those alliance partners, other than our party, with a cadre and press. This will draw alliance organisations closer together. This is vital, as the left must be united to build a socialist party, the sooner the better, as a league of the oppressed against the oppressors.

The control-freakery of the Blairites has meant that workers have to find their own political voice and fight for a democratic workers' republic as a first step towards socialism. Such a party must have high politics and consistent democracy at its core. Not economism and sectarianism.

SWP and LSA
SWP and LSA

SP Wally

The Socialist Party's decision to stand Wally Kennedy in his former Hillingdon council seat is excellent news for the wider left in London. Wally has a reputation as a good fighting socialist and working class representative. An addition to the small band of independently elected socialist councillors would be something to cheer us all in these otherwise bleak times.

The celebrations are tempered by the SP's reluctance to stand on a broader ticket. At a time when the prospect of getting comrades elected to the GLA seems a real possibility you would think a course of 'all hands to the pump' would be the order of the day.

The need to push the LSA at every conceivable opportunity is obvious and raises the broader questions of who selects workers' candidates, who are they accountable to, and what takes the movement forward. Standing as 'Socialist Alternative' (new electoral rules forbid standing under the Socialist Party banner) admittedly is not the most burning issue confronting the left, but is out of step with more positive recent developments.

The reasons previously for this policy were, I believe, that the alliances were not genuine bodies (even in Lewisham and Coventry where the alliances have a semblance of being 'real', the SP stands apart). However, the net result has been that the alliances were not taken seriously by the SP, which held back the project when they were the biggest component part.

That the organisation has an ability to contest elections with some vigour is not in question: what disappoints me is the lack of foresight and insularity. I disagree with the CPGB comrades' belief that the SP are in some form of terminal decline. They will continue the routines and probably grow at some point - the interesting question is, as what? A part of, or apart from, the rest of the movement?

SP Wally
SP Wally

Work in Labour

I consider myself a supporter of the CPGB. The goal of the formation of a strong Communist Party capable of leading the working class is a goal that all genuine revolutionaries should share.

It is refreshing to see an organisation that is committed to ending the disease of sectarianism which weakens our movement and our class. The openness of the Weekly Worker and the genuine commitment to open discussion within the CPGB are all very positive factors which drew me towards the CPGB.

However, I feel that to build on these foundations the CPGB needs to take on a broader orientation. I believe that there are two ways in which communists can work at the present time. Where a body like the LSA exists then communists should work within that to fight sectarianism and build an ideological alternative to capitalism. This should be linked to the fight within the Labour Party to defeat Blairism by presenting a clear, class-based alternative. If communists place themselves at the core of this opposition then they should have the perspective of using it to address those workers still in the thrall of Labourism and should aim to split these workers into the Communist Party.

I believe that the CPGB should aim to try and build a cell of communists within the Labour Party who are willing to build the opposition to Blairism and will give it the leadership and direction it needs. This group would be illegal under LP rules but, as the CPGB's programme points out, legality and illegality are just different stages in the class struggle. The LP is best viewed as a sphere of struggle and as such should be participated in until the goal of splitting its base from its leadership has been fulfilled.

I would be interested to hear comrades thoughts on this.

Work in Labour
Work in Labour

Nick's tantrums

Nick Long's response to Ian Donovan (Weekly Worker March 16) is just so pathetic. Obviously written in a tantrum - perhaps a retraction will follow?

He is clearly not a happy lad. After all, his little project of witch-hunt and manoeuvre in both the Socialist Labour Party and LSA has got him absolutely nowhere. And as a former convenor of LSA I know all about his little tricks and smears. His latest attempts have left him high and dry and on his own. Forced to resign from the chair of the LSA and unsuccessful in yet another attempt to oust the CPGB, his project of one-man witch-hunting lies exposed and defeated.

His smears against Ian Donovan have obviously come via the Spartacist League. Given his own record it is not surprising that he relies on a group known better for its hysteria than its honesty. Then to round off he jibes the AWL and CPGB about lack of members. Somehow it does not work. After all unless Nick is claiming Dolly the sheep I don't think he has a clone.

Nick's tantrums
Nick's tantrums

Road hump

Nick Long might as well give politics up as a bad job. If not for the only reason that every time that his searing intelligence raises its inglorious head above the parapet, it gets shot apart in the pages of the Weekly Worker. It seems only a few weeks ago that my dreary bus journey around Stockport was enlivened by Long and Toby Abse with their pants down once again after being caught out in dishonestly attaching the name of Terry Liddle to a motion attacking the CPGB. Ian Donovan's recent characterisation of Long as a failed, opportunist politician was spot on.

Which is why Long is forced to reply with the following rant: "I note that our pugilist, Ian Donovan, has started hitting his keyboard rather than women - long may it continue". Interesting that this attempt to slur Ian mirrors exactly that of the Spartacist League, who want everybody to think of our comrade as some sort of psychopath, precisely so as not to highlight the chamber of horrors he was exposed to inside their rotten sect. I don't defend Ian Donovan clobbering an individual in the Spartacist League. I would be a bit stupid to do so considering that Ian himself has repudiated his isolated action. But, just for the record, Nick, I was pleased to welcome Ian as a supporter of the CPGB. The fact that Long resorts to this sort of polemic as a reply to Ian's political critique is glorious proof of both his current isolation and the bankruptcy of his 'method'.

It might be useful to look at Long's cast-iron assurance that the CPGB "failed to gain a single recruit during their [SLP] entry work over four years". Now as someone who was recruited from the SLP (whoops, there goes the theory!) I know this is a complete fabrication. Secondly, Manchester CPGB is predominantly composed of comrades who were won to membership during the SLP 'experience', including two comrades with a long history as local trade unionists. Thirdly, the CPGB's current supporters in south Wales are all people who first came across the Weekly Worker when they were in ... you guessed it, the SLP. Fourthly, consider Ian Donovan. In 1997 and 1998 he was a member of the IBT's then faction in ... the SLP, providing a highly critical analysis of the CPGB's concurrent intervention. Did we completely alienate Ian? I think not. We might even conclude that he was recruited as a result of our work in the ... er, what was it Nick? Oh yes, the SLP.

Of course this process of recruitment was a bit more sophisticated than offering people a few road humps and henceforth being their friend for life. Nearly all these comrades (including myself) thought the CPGB and the Weekly Worker were a bit wild at first, but it seems that we all learnt otherwise through a lengthy process of engagement and fierce debate.

Road hump
Road hump

Non-reply

Nick Long replies to my questioning his slanderous attacks on the CPGB with the accusation that I am a "pugilist" whose normal activities involve "hitting women". I have to say that I welcome his personal attack, since it gives me the chance to once again draw readers' attention to the evidence and findings of the April 1999 London Socialist Alliance-initiated Commission of Inquiry into the events which he is distorting, available to the public on-line at www.revplat.demon.co.uk

Long's non-reply will be seen as the cheap diversion that it is by anyone who examines in detail the evidence. Much material about the vicious mistreatment of myself and many other comrades by comrade Long's sometime allies in the Spartacist League, contained on this website, shows clearly what was the real cause of this aberrant incident in my otherwise completely non-violent 22 years in active left politics. May comrade Long continue to draw attention to this question, as the more people get to read the material, the more widely the truly monstrous and inhuman nature of his Spartacist friends will be known! But then he is known to have a soft spot for the most anti-democratic and bizarre excrescences of the left, as shown by his letter, and it is likely he does not mind being associated with such things.

Nick's statement that the regime in the SLP was "rather open" should make people wonder: what kind of regime would he regard as 'rather closed'? Since expulsions without trial were the norm in the SLP, and branch meetings in south London in particular, within about three months of the founding conference in May 1996, were characterised by systematic physical threats against critics and a general atmosphere of bureaucratic mayhem. Some genuinely "pugilistic" elements were involved with comrade Long in the leadership of the south London SLP at this time, elements with such a long-standing record of violence that their shenanigans, in both the Labour Party and the SLP, were featured in Private Eye on a number of occasions.

Even as recently as the autumn of 1997, after all these scandals, comrade Long was still involved in seeking to witch-hunt supporters of the Weekly Worker out of the SLP. In truth, there was more pretence of due process in Stalin's Moscow purge trials than in Scargill's SLP. There, you never had the right to trial at all. So maybe Nick thinks that Stalin was too 'open': ie, too soft?

But what is remarkable about comrade Long's letter is his evasion of the questions I originally posed. What has the CPGB's position on how to fight or not fight fascism got to do with the murder of Stephen Lawrence or the harrasment of Alison Moore? Comrade Long's innuendo that the CPGB was in some way responsible for these actions, or in some way condoned them, is Stalinist slander of the highest degree, implying that the CPGB is in some way pro-fascist.

It is also instructive to note that this slander was made to motivate a motion to expel supporters of the CPGB from the Greenwich and Lewisham Socialist Alliance, on the basis of the same garbage. What is more embarrassing for comrade Long is that the motion, which was his political initiative, was presented with the fraudulent endorsement of someone who had not read it, and was subsequently revealed not to have supported its contents at all! Long does not see fit to reply to the outraged letter from Terry Liddle (Weekly Worker February 24) exposing the fact that his name had been put on Long's witch-hunting motion in this way, without his consent.

With such corrupt practices, it is no wonder comrade Long thinks that the SLP regime was "rather open". At least Scargill had the guts to carry out his witch-hunts in his own name!

I guess I, as a "Leninist revolutionary" and a supporter of the Weekly Worker, could be in the same party as the likes of Nick Long, as much as Scargill at least. A party led by the likes of Nick Long, however, would be a carbon copy of the SLP. What is needed is a struggle to change the anti-democratic political culture of much of the left, spawned by the rotten politics of reformism, Stalinism and reinforced by similar pathologies on the Trotskyist 'far left'.

Non-reply
Non-reply

Russia-Expo

As Russian and western 'elites' gather in London, April 19-20, to complete their rape and privatisation of Russia, a massive demonstration is being organised to 'Stop Russia-Expo!' The SWP and International Solidarity with Workers in Russia tried to agree the political basis of this united front.

I rang the SWP beforehand and discussed the possible umbrella name for the united front, what slogans to use and their priority. They had already decided - and this was not up for change.

The SWP wanted 'Stop Russia's war in Chechnya!' - to be the priority, and 'Stop the market mafia!' and 'Stop Zhirinovsky!' as secondary. They had already prepared a leaflet statement which was striking by one omission - it failed to mention the role of western capital at all in imposing mass misery on Russian workers, pointing the finger only at the Russian elite themselves.

ISWoR had 'Stop the market madness!' as the priority, and then 'Stop the killings in Chechnya!' and 'Stop Zhirinovsky and the racists!' as supporting slogans. Why? Because it is absolutely essential, in our opposition to Russia-Expo, to show Russian workers above all that we solidarise with their plight, caused by capitalism. The Russian media, tightly controlled by the country's bourgeoisis, will be at pains to dismiss our demo as a manifestation of popular backing for western imperialism and Chechen nationalists in the onslaught against Russian so-called 'national interest'.

We must remember that Russian workers have up till now heard the anti-racist and anti-war arguments almost exclusively from pro-western free-market forces. Meanwhile the Russian red-brown 'left' limits its anti-capitalism to attacking the 'comprador' bourgeoisie; workers are told that the good, pure ethnic Russian bourgeoisie need strengthening instead - which coincides with Putin's and Zhirinovsky's aims too.

To cut through all this we must be absolutely clear - we are workers, solidarising with Russian workers, against all bosses! Our demo must be so saturated with slogans of international solidarity that even the best efforts of Berezovsky's camera and sound men to avoid it will be in vain.

But the SWP leaders see this demo as an attack on Russia, wanting to 'stop' a war against Chechnya that is over; they attack only Russian capitalists and not their western imperialist masters and advisors; they use 'Stop the market mafia', knowing that 'mafia' is the western media term for Russian capitalism nowadays. The stress on words like 'mafia', 'crony', 'crook', etc is to sow the illusion of a clean, law-abiding capitalism.

This is all sourced in their wrong 'state capitalism' analysis of the ex-USSR that has led them to almost dismiss Russian workers, to the extent that they call Oleg Shein, interviewed in the Weekly Worker (February 10), a nazi, a red-brown Strasserite, and me a nazi collaborator for giving him any credibility. It is no wonder the SWP have no supporters in Russia.

Russia-Expo
Russia-Expo

Speak up, Jack

Dave Craig has claimed that the CPGB privately support his ludicrous "dual power republic" strategy (Weekly Worker March 16). Now it is not surprising that a long-term Menshevik like Craig has a strategy to recreate that time in history when the Mensheviks were in government - but the would-be Bolsheviks of the CPGB?

In all the months since the strategy was first aired, the CPGB has not mentioned it, as far as I remember. I had assumed that this was out of embarrassment, hoping that Craig would forget about it. Even the other RDG members don't seem to have had the nerve to pronounce on it - but you now have to take a position. What does Jack think?

Speak up, Jack
Speak up, Jack