Letters

Honour Stalin

I was intrigued by Mary Godwin's account, 'Blair's police stop May Day march' (Weekly Worker May 4). I was not present since I was out of London, but have spoken to some who were on the march.

There was a significant Turkish and Kurdish presence - there usually is on May Day. The article says, "The isolation of these groups from the British working class movement remains a tragedy." But I would argue that it is precisely because Turks and Kurds are revolutionary that they are isolated from the indigenous working class movement.

Even May Day this year provides an illustration. To judge from Mary Godwin's article, the LSA and related groups allowed the police to stop them entering Trafalgar Square. No self-respecting revolutionary from Turkey would allow the police to do that if there were an alternative route. And there was. Besides British anarchists, a number of far left parties and groups from Turkey managed to bypass the police. I have been told that it was transport police, not riot police, who stopped the flower of the British labour movement.

Revolutionary Turks and Kurds honour Stalin, whereas the dominant trend in the British left, along with respect for police lines, is Trotskyism - a current associated in Turkey with reformism. It is tragic that the Anatolian left in Britain is separate from the British left. It is even more tragic that the British left has nothing to teach Turkish and Kurdish revolutionaries except social democracy.

Honour Stalin
Honour Stalin

Big trouble

Given the shouts from the Longbridge workers at the head of the May Day march, "Rover, Rover, Rover", doesn't Mary Godwin see the irony in her remark that the anti-capitalists are following "a reactionary agenda"? She says that we must be on our guard against spontaneous upsurges of opposition to capitalism beginning to take on an anti-working class agenda. The question is, has it begun to? If so, when?

I met a bloke in Trafalgar Square who had just come out of prison after serving 18 months for the Liverpool Street protests. He did not want that to happen again. Like Mary and me he was really angry about the present organisation of the workers' movement. We watched as they wound down the loudspeakers, knowing that the opportunity to communicate and unify a confused situation was being taken from us.

This bloke talked of his commitment to trade unionism and the Labour Party and how in the end his spirit had been broken by them. If we cannot understand his determination to search for something different then we are in big trouble.

Big trouble
Big trouble

Anti-racism

Alan Fox seems to imagine that racism only applies to chauvinism toward those with "dark skins" ('Hague's last refuge' Weekly Worker April 20). He thus posits one narrowly defined kind of racist: one who might adjudge some Roma with "dark skins compared with the biological racists' stereotypical northern European" as lesser beings and thus be opposed to them as a different 'race'.

Alan's simplistic approach is inadequate and fails to address the fact that there are different racisms.

While the policy of the British state is presently 'official anti-racism', this acts only as a formal counter to particular kinds of racism. Most particularly, it is formally opposed to a racism that objectifies persons of African, African-Caribbean or Asian origin as of a different (and, almost inevitably, inferior) 'race'. Weekly Worker writers have correctly noted for some time this official condemnation of specific UK forms of racism. Instead of what might be called 'British Empire racism' defined by skin coloration, the Blairites are attempting to officially replace it with a new idea of a British 'race' incorporating the 'black British' and the 'Asian British'.

Even Alan concedes that there are different kinds of racism by his use of the phrase "biological racists". Thus, racism may not after all always be predicated primarily on what appears to be Alan's fixed definition of the racist paradigm: concern with skin colour. Racism is chauvinism on the basis of perceptions of what constitutes race.

The racism that is exercised by government and Dover thugs on refugee Roma exists; it is palpable and stoked up by the gutter press. It exists because both Blairites and thugs see Roma as lesser: they are without the benefit and rights of being a British subject, and thus susceptible to being imprisoned, degraded, kept in penury, and deported. Here xenophobia and chauvinism take on exactly the racist form. Those Roma who have been established in Britain over centuries - the Butlins, Coopers, Days, Smiths et al - have often been on the receiving end of racism of a particularly pernicious kind. Yet the overwhelming majority of them have little in the way of physical characteristics to distinguish them from the majority population.

We combat national chauvinism and racism by demanding no immigration controls whatsoever and exposing our rulers' varying use of such reactionary ideas - not by pretending that there is no element of racism within the explicit and implicit chauvinism expressed against workers beyond the UK's borders.

Anti-racism
Anti-racism

Party type

There is at least one thing upon which all Marxists are agreed: we need a mass workers' party. Yet we have hardly begun to debate amongst ourselves precisely what type of organisation we are talking about. There are two starkly polarised positions on the table thus far, both of which I want to argue against.

Workers Power argues that anything short of a revolutionary party would prove worthless. While less emphatic, Jim Blackstock (Weekly Worker April 27) indicates that he is thinking along similar lines - although clearly without the same take-it-or-leave-it implication. At the opposite end of the spectrum lie SPEW and the AWL. The latter's advocacy of a new 'Labour Representation Committee' does imply that the splitting of the mass parties of the Second International at the end of World War I was a mistake.

The model for our party should be neither old Labour nor a pure revolutionary party. What we need is a pre-1912, RSDLP-type organisation. Revolutionaries need to be inside a party in which honest reformist workers are happy to work with us. If Livingstone, Abbot, Benn, Corbyn, Skinner, etc can be as tolerant towards a Leninist tendency as were Martov, Plekhanov, etc, fine. Let them join.

We need to organise everyone who wants the Blairites to be challenged from the left to help us determine who our candidates should be. The socialist alliances have perhaps no more than 12 months in which to establish that any split in the left vote at the coming general election is not our fault. We need to organise hustings meetings right across the country. And we need to invite Arthur Scargill, Peter Tatchell, Graham Cee, etc to submit to a majority vote.

All selected candidates (whether they come from a single-issue background or not) have to be acceptable to revolutionaries. The kind of party that would emerge out of such a process would not (certainly not immediately) be a revolutionary party. It would though (in my opinion) correspond to the type of organisation revolutionaries need at this stage. Rapprochement between all the fragments of the revolutionary left into a united Bolshevik faction would be a parallel process rather than an alternative to the creation of a broad workers' party.

We don't need one or the other, comrades. We need both.

Party type
Party type

CATP

At the last CPGB aggregate (reported in the Weekly Worker April 13) the issue of Revolutionary Democratic Group support for the Campaign against Tube Privatisation was raised. You reported some CPGB members trying to undermine the RDG by claiming one member is a keen supporter of the CATP slate in the GLA elections.

They must be referring to me, as I am the only RDG member to have participated in CATP since it began in mid-1998. However, I can't remember seeing the CPGB there more than once. How they know exactly what my involvement is I don't know.

My last contact with CATP was nearly four months ago at the January 11 meeting. I tried to put forward amendments to broaden Sikorski's 'single-issue' platform, but was disallowed by his block vote - interestingly this was most of the old London committee of the SLP, or the Fourth International Supporters Caucus, as they are otherwise known.

My view was that winning a broader platform for CATP would have increased the chances of a joint CATP/LSA slate. I think the organisations of the LSA made a mistake in not intervening directly in CATP. The AWL was halfway there, at least. Pat Sikorski is not all-powerful. There is no reason he should have everything his own way.

As a tubeworker and RMT activist, I see the importance of a public campaign against privatisation. That this campaign is based in the workers' movement is significant for communists. As an RDG member I support the LSA project. It is very important. The RDG has always supported genuine steps forward to unity.

The division between CATP and the LSA in these elections is a reflection of the failure to struggle for unity. We are not guaranteed success, but failure must be recognised. I would aim the main criticism at the LSA organisations, as I would expect more from them. I don't expect much from Sikorski and his little gang.

CATP
CATP