Letters
Impressive
I am sending you a cheque for £20. I started reading the Weekly Worker on the net a few months ago and have then taken out a subscription. I feel that our organisation and its paper are unique on the left and serve a very important function. Your coverage of the Socialist Alliance and the fuel protests is excellent. Congratulations on producing an analytical and very honest paper. It is most impressive.
Impressive
Impressive
Billy Elliot
Darrell Goodliffe (Weekly Worker November 23) takes a jaundiced view of Lee Hall's Billy Elliot, reading into it a negative, unsympathetic treatment of the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85 which is not in the film. He says it would be "wrong to assume ... any implicitly pro-working class message". This strained formulation admits there is nothing in the film explicitly anti-working class.
Good art is not didactic. It should not pedantically spell out explicit lessons, but present a taste of contradictory reality, giving us food for thought. The film does this very well, by interweaving the desperate conflict of the mining village against an occupying police army with Billy's fight to overcome the inverse snobbery that says ballet dancing is 'not for the likes of us'. Despite what Darrell says, working class cultural horizons are raised. Billy wins the support of his family and community.
Riot police are shown rampaging through the village, running through people's living rooms to hunt down individual pickets. This is what happened - but show me another film that depicts it so truthfully. As Ian Mitchell, a Yorkshire miner during the Great Strike, says when interviewing screenwriter Lee Hall in the December issue of the SWP's Socialist Review, "you'd be a complete idiot" to miss the fact that "the film came over as very favourable to the miners".
Billy Elliot
Billy Elliot
Misreading message
I am afraid comrade Darrell Goodliffe got it all wrong when he went to see Billy Elliot. Would he have been happier with one of those North Korean quasi-realist epics? Billy Elliot was not about the miners' strike. It was about an individual's aspiration against all odds. Author Lee Hall was remembering his own working class childhood being bullied carrying his little violin. The strike was the backdrop.
Yet it was clear where the author's sympathies lay - with the strikers, epitomised by the father who, like all people in real life struggles, is faced with the dual (and sometimes conflicting) interests of the personal and the class. The message was clear: 1. You can overcome any adversity if you are determined enough. 2. The ruling classes are inflexible in their opposition to the working class. 3. The working class can learn to overcome its prejudices. And finally that art, even so called high art, belongs to the working class. And all this told as a fairy tale.
Misreading message
Misreading message
Charges dropped
The Crown Prosecution Service has, quite predictably, decided not to pursue the case against John Curtis, the anti-fascist arrested at the anti-NF demonstration in Margate on October 21 "attempting to destroy or damage lamp post number C1T1013, the property of Thanet District Council, contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Damage Act 1971" by scraping off a National Front sticker using a house key.
Charges dropped
Anarchism
David Moran talks about the repression of the anarchist Black Guard as a "revolutionary liquidation, by the working class" (Letters, November 23). No, it was not. It was an attack by the Bolsheviks, pretending to speak on behalf of the working class. Yes, there was mass popular revulsion against the attacks. Witness the motion by the Kronstadt Soviet on April 18 1918 condemning the actions. At this point the Kronstadters were still Trotsky's flower of the revolution: they had not magically transformed themselves into kulak pro-White elements!
Maybe Leninists are "slow on the uptake", but a handful is around five people. Six hundred anarchists were arrested in the attacks not a handful (but what would a thick "Bakuninist" like me know?). Every source I have consulted on the attacks talks about 30-40 anarchists being killed in the fighting, so denying that those killed were anarchists, because I only named one, is not on.
To talk about the Makhno forces as "kulak" is preposterous. Any detailed account of the Makhnovist movement shows that it was made up of predominantly poor peasants and that the Makhnovists had a revolutionary programme. Is Moran aware of the two assassination attempts on Makhno carried out by Bolshevik security services? Is he unaware of the systematic shooting of hundreds of Makhnovists and the breaking up of revolutionary land communes, one of them called the Rosa Luxemburg? Is he aware that the telegram from Lenin to Rakovsky was aimed at the Nabat Confederation of Anarchists and not specifically at the Makhnovists?
If he can find any proof of Nabat involvement in the shooting of Bolsheviks I would like to know. No, Moran is flustered now, and he has to start slinging around accusations of fascism against the Makhnovists, with all the anti-semitic inferences.
As regards glossing over the "ministerial anarchist" complicity in the suppression of Poumists and of Bolshevik Leninists (they really were a handful!) during the May days in 1937 in Spain, is he not aware that the Stalinists also murdered anarchists during the events? Both Italian anarchists like Berneri and Barbieri, and leading members of the Libertarian Youth were gunned down. Is he unaware that the Anarchist Federation has consistently denounced the actions of the CNT-FAI ministers and has published a pamphlet on the Friends of Durruti, a key oppositional anarchist current in the May events?
Moran failed to answer my previous question. Why, if the Bolshevik government had just abolished the death sentence, were revolutionaries being summarily shot by the Cheka?
A price worth paying? First the anarchists, then the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, then the Mensheviks, then the Kronstadters! And somehow none of this is related to the rise of Stalin!
Anarchism
Anarchism
CPGB and Trotskyism
Once again the Weekly Worker, in its report on the CPGB (November 16) weekend school, chooses to simply caricaturise the position of Trotskyists. This is not surprising, knowing your political tradition. You claim that Trotskyists say Lenin wished to hand power back to the capitalists after a succesful revolution of the proletarian and peasantry.
This is distorting the facts. Prior to April 1917, he did not believe that a socialist takeover would be possible in Russia, due to the backwardness of the country. Rather he believed a capitalist stage of development had to be fully completed first. However, he did see that the Russian bourgeoisie, being largely dependent on foreign capital, would be unable to carry out the tasks of the democratic revolution. Therefore only the proletariat, with the backing of the peasantry, would be able to smash the tsarist autocracy.
However, in 1917, due to the experiences of both the war and the February revolution, his views came to develop and resemble more those of Trotsky (despite your denials of this). This is what caused much opposition in the Bolshevik ranks towards the April thesis. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat would be able to take the revolution forward, as the provisional government was failing to carry out any of its tasks and dual power was leaving the working class open to betrayal from bourgeois forces. This was due to the class collaboration of the Mensheviks and SRs.
Lenin's view of the party question had also altered at the beginning of the war, due to the opportunist treachery of the German social democrats in voting for war credits. The break with Kautsky was mainly over this, as Kautsky saw no reason to split the SPD. Opportunism was not simply a backward element that could be tolerated in the workers' party, but was a direct result of imperialism creating a labour aristocracy. Hence the Kautskyite position of the party of the whole class was dropped. The party would only be open to those committed to a revolutionary programme.
I was unable to attend on the Sunday, but judging by the report on the Fourth International you obviously believe it to have been an abortion. If anything it was too late rather than too soon, going by the German experience. Trotsky did try to create a left opposition within the Third International, but the events in Germany 1933 showed its bankruptcy as a tool for revolution. This was after the experience of China in 1927, and the British general strike.
Besides, the idea that Trotskyists could have remained as an opposition within the Stalinist parties after the events in Spain, for instance, is just plain ridiculous. Troskyists were being shot and purged, for god's sake! Has Mark Fischer ever read Homage to Catalonia? Perhaps if he has he should give it another read.
The Fourth International may have had its difficulties, but it was the only alternative under the circumstances. I fail to see how the dead can build a revolution, which is how the Trotskyists would have ended up had they attempted to stay within the ranks of the Stalinists. A traitorous leadership is bad enough, but turning up for meetings only to find a gun to your head is another.
CPGB and Trotskyism
CPGB and Trotskyism
Political prisoners
Today, November 28 2000, is the 40th day of the death fast resistance by the political prisoners of Turkey. We call upon all of those who are concerned about the rights of political prisoners to show support at this critical time. Across Europe the supporters of the death fast resistance are now entering the 30th day of their solidarity hunger strike. Also the supporters of the revolutionary struggle in Turkey who find themselves in the prison of Europe are completing their 21st day of hunger strike.
The demand of the prisoners that they shall not be forced to enter isolation cells is a concern all progressive and democratic human beings should share. The policy of oppression against political prisoners in Turkey manifests itself in massacres and tortures. In a land where people go hungry, the regime is spending millions on building isolation cells. They aim to make political prisoners surrender their beliefs and to turn prisons into torture centres.
The resistance of the prisoners is the hope of the people; the prisoners will never abandon their beliefs or their love of the people.
Wherever you are in the world it is a right and a duty to resist oppression. Wherever you are in the world it is your duty to support those who resist.
We strongly believe that the actions of concerned Europeans can save lives in the prisons of Turkey. Please use your influence and help us prevent the introduction of isolation cells in Turkey.
Solidarity messages to:
tel: +44 (0)20 7254 1266
fax: +44 (0)20 7923 2095
email: ikm_london@yahoo.com.
Political prisoners
Political prisoners