Letters

Iranian sit-in victory

On June 19, workers from Chit-e-Rey textile factory, near Tehran, held the manager of this privatised company hostage for three hours in protest at non-payment of their wages. Hours later it appeared that their long struggle for unpaid wages has finally succeeded.

Over the last few years workers from this factory have participated in a number of struggles for their basic rights. In recent months the factory was transferred from Bonyad Mostazafin (an islamic foundation) to the private sector. Neither the foundation, nor Chit-e-Rey?s new owners, nor the Tehran stock exchange that conducted the sale would give any information on how the textile plant was sold. But the workers who participated in demonstrations last week in front of the Iranian Majles (islamic parliament) were adamant that the factory was sold to three private investors whose only intention was to declare bankruptcy and sell its 16 hectares of land.

Production stopped last December and the workers? wages were not paid. The 3,700 workers blocked the main Tehran-Karaj road on a number of occasions to protest against Bonyad Mostazafin. On Monday these workers attacked their new owner-manager and smashed furniture and hurled computers out of windows when their new boss arrived for the first time in two weeks, but empty-handed.

Bonyad Mostazafin employed 63,000 people and owns 400 companies but claims that only 85 of these are profit-making and has embarked on large-scale privatisation. The privatisation policy is mainly aimed at benefiting supporters of the regime in the bazaar and in commerce, reducing further the production sector.

On June 19, Chit-e-Rey workers appeared to succeed in finally obtaining their unpaid wages, totalling 160 million tomans, and a reversal of the privatisation policy. This is a major victory for textile workers in Iran, who, deprived of the right to independent workers? organisations, the right to strike or to protest, have waged brave, consistent fights over the last few months. This victory will encourage many workers facing similar conditions.

Workers Left Unity Iran reminds international supporters of Iranian workers that solidarity with Iranian workers is urgently required to help workers get their unpaid wages and to obtain the right set up their independent organisations.

Iranian sit-in victory
Iranian sit-in victory

Hints on euro

In last week?s Socialist Worker Alex Callinicos celebrates the result of the Irish referendum on the treaty of Nice: ?A coalition of pacifist, nationalist and leftwing parties succeeded in winning a 54% majority against the treaty? (June 16).

?It?s important to bear in mind the socialist case against the EU,? Callinicos argues, because ?from the start European integration has been about creating a strong bloc of capitalist powers?. The SWP chief theoretician thinks it?s a pity that in Britain the anti-euro corner is firmly occupied by rightwing Tories and worse. He fears that when Tony Blair puts forward his referendum on the introduction of the single currency he will portray everyone who is against the euro as ?a backward-looking, Little England bigot?. He continues: ?But there will be others campaigning against the euro because of its negative economic consequences, and because they don?t want Europe to rival the United States as a big imperialist bully throwing its weight around the world.?

The comrades in the SWP presumably prefer to be ruled over by a small state, rather than a big one. Callinicos also hints at the position the SWP will take on the euro referendum whenever it comes: ?For them [the thousands of people that demonstrated in Gothenburg] opposition to the EU is just one front in the war against global capitalism. Socialists in Britain may find ourselves fighting on this front before too long.?

The comrade seems to be overseeing a populist line change; either that or he has a rather short memory. At the Birmingham conference where the Socialist Alliance decided its manifesto guidelines, the SWP actually voted for the principled formulation, ?Neither the pound nor the euro?. What advantage is there for the British working class to be ruled by Westminster rather than Brussels or Berlin? Is the SWP now chasing after everybody who is against the expansion of the EU or the introduction of the euro?

On a purely objective level the creation of a more or less united European working class is actually a step forward. The potential for long-overdue European-wide trade unions and workers? parties is a good thing - although the conditions that gave rise to the new circumstances would be masterminded by the European bourgeoisie. It shows the weakness of the European working class that it is not us who are putting the democratic unification of Europe forward. That does not of course mean that we should support what is without a doubt a move to improve the way the European bourgeoisie can exploit its working class.

But the agreed position of the Socialist Alliance does provide us with the excellent opportunity to put an independent working class alternative forward: we could, for example, conduct a militant campaign to boycott the referendum. Or we could urge the millions of people who are against the increased power of the European bourgeoisie but are in favour of the unification of the European working class to write exactly that on their ballot paper: ?Neither pound nor euro. For a united European working class.?

Hints on euro
Hints on euro

Get a grip

Comrades, isn?t it about time that you understood that the poor need a united communist party that really understands what it is like to be pissed off? Get a grip, or the fascists will reap the anger. Stop attacking the Morning Star - it?s all we have. Unite!

Get a grip

Nods and winks

I don?t agree with Mark Fischer that the Socialist Alliance should have supported and campaigned for Diane Abbott in Hackney (Weekly Worker June 14).

When Mark reports Diane Abbott supporting the priority pledges of the SA, he misses out that the Green Party and the Liberal Democrat supported them too. When he quotes Diane Abbott, saying she is not a ?lackey of Tony Blair?, he misses out the flip side of this comment in the rest of her speech. She said, because she is black, because she is a women, because she is isolated, it?s very difficult for her to get anything done at all. It prompted an immediate question from a nursery parent asking her why anyone should vote for her if all she could offer was excuses.

I find it very strange that a week after the election Mark should call for a campaign for Abbott when previously and during there were only comments from the CPGB on challenging her. Surely calling for a vote for her is over-egging it after one question and one desultory answer? I thought the point of challenging her was to mobilise opposition and begin to develop our tactics and strategy in this militant borough. Mark is asking to rubber-stamp what was politically true in Hackney anyway. Socialist Alliance pledges did not delineate us from other parties or inspire. 51% didn?t vote.

The defeats of our class have left a lot of us in denial, including Mark. Yes, strategy and tactics are very important, but they are just elastoplasts unless you?ve got some vision thing going. People are not interested in us shouting, ?Tax the rich? and ?Renationalise everything?. They?ve heard it before countless times in Hackney over umpteen years. They?ve seen it in operation and understand where it leads to: ie, here. And they realise that we?re not going to be able to do that anyway, so why bother touting this rubbish in the first place? Unless we?re keeping something from them.

And the really crazy thing is that what we?re keeping from them we?re keeping from ourselves - with nods and winks (strategy and tactics) taking its place.

Phil Rudge
Hackney

Hints on euro

Nods and winks
Nods and winks

SSP-SA unity

Much is being made of the relatively good election results of the SSP - relative to the Socialist Alliance, that is. Our ultra-nationalist wing clutches at the straw of the differential vote as a pretext for severing what tenuous links have already been established. Having lost the battle to keep the SWP out, they have been trying to whip up a witch-hunting atmosphere over a few Socialist Workers sold in public. Now they seem determined to drag the SSP down an anti-SA cul de sac, one that would inevitably split the left in the trade unions.

It is true that the SSP did better than the SA. But that is because we fought the election with several advantages. Unlike our English and Welsh comrades, this time around the Socialist Labour Party wrecking operation had, to all intents and purposes, been driven out of Scotland. King Arthur had been sent home to think again. That is why he focussed all his pent up sectarianism on our comrades down south.

While it was a welcome relief for SSP members to find we had all but liberated ourselves from Scargill?s spoiling operation, this victory was not won overnight. It took us four long years, two general elections, a European election, a Scottish parliamentary general election and many parliamentary and local by-elections to hammer home the point that the SLP is an empty shell, one whose activist base had been bled dry, thanks to an inhospitable bureaucratic regime.

The SA should not be so naive as to suppose that what is now common knowledge among the political anoraks of the revolutionary left (in large part thanks to regular Weekly Worker coverage) has seeped down into the consciousness of our potential vote. Far from it. In fact, most of our potential vote probably remembers that the SLP has been around since before the last general election fighting elections, meaning the SA can easily be thought of as a ragbag of Johnny-come-latelies. Unless the SA realises that it has a job of work to do to explain why it arrived on the scene as yet another electoral opposition to New Labour, then workers are more likely to blame it, rather than Scargill, for the split vote!

If for no other reason (and other reasons were not hard to find), canvassing should have been exploited to the full (especially where the SLP were standing against us) in order to explain to the potential left-of-Labour vote what the SA had done to leave behind the Life of Brian sectarianism of the past, and what Scargill keeps doing to revive it. Anyone in the slightest familiar with the Scottish experience could have warned the SA that leafleting and relying on our PEB being better than Scargill?s could never adequately address the problem posed by his SLP.

Whoever took the decision to sabotage canvassing in the closing days of the campaign bears an enormous responsibility for the loss of tens of thousands of votes and hundreds (possibly thousands) of contacts. An explanation for this bizarre decision needs to be sought. I can only assume that the SWP leadership lacked confidence in the political skills and/or commitment of their own rank and file. Inevitably, they would have provided the bulk of canvassers.

Being a successful canvasser demands certain abilities. You have to engage in a dialogue, develop a rapport, and tease out what each individual worker needs reassurance about before switching his/her vote. A canvasser has to have come prepared with answers to all manner of complex questions: sound bites won?t get you very far.

Paper-selling come rain or shine, turning up on time for demos, shouting slogans, fly-posting, handing out leaflets, holding banners and placards - all have their place. But to convince workers that we deserve their votes cannot be done unless we can reassure them that our candidate has a brain, and has been selected by, and is supported by, others who themselves are sufficiently confident in their politics to vigorously, but fraternally, defend it against all-comers. Canvassing is an integral part of that process. It is clear from the reports of Pete Radcliff?s Nottingham campaign (in the Weekly Worker and Action for Solidarity) just what a difference canvassing could have made. The lessons have to be learnt. Quickly.

I can think of one other reason why a part of the SWP leadership might have felt more comfortable with the Stalinist approach to agitation (descending into a noisy monologue over the heads of our class), rather than the approach outlined by Trotsky: that of a democratic dialogue with our class. A disproportionate number of the most articulate, enthusiastic and hard-working canvassers were likely to come from the SWP?s organised competition on the revolutionary left. There may have been an element of paranoia that the CPGB, Alliance for Workers? Liberty and Workers Power could have gone ?off message?. What evidence we have suggests that such anxieties are misguided. Everyone appreciated the need for discipline. Everyone ought to have been trusted to work to maximise the SA vote by focussing on what unites us all.

One final point about the SSP. Whatever Alan McCombes might think, the party?s pinning its colours firmly to the pro-independence banner is patently a vote-loser. The SNP was quick off the mark to denounce the SSP?s electoral intervention for handing one of their seats to the pro-unionist Tories. Our fighting a losing battle with the SNP for a share of a pro-independence vote that hovers around the 30% mark is a self-defeating strategy.

I would suggest that on the national question at least we might want to take a leaf out of Blair?s book. Blair knew he could not sell his preferred pro-euro position to a sceptical electorate. Therefore, he kicked the issue into the long grass, via the mechanism of a referendum. It did the trick wonderfully for Blair. In much the same manner, the SSP can build a far more powerful democratic coalition of the entire socialist left in Scotland. We can do so by simply standing by the right of the Scottish people to self-determination by supporting their right to a referendum on the issue.

That will attract towards us far more votes and far more active members.

SSP-SA unity
SSP-SA unity

SLP failure

The elections showed the Tories? crisis and that Blair lost 2.5 million votes. It also showed the failure of Arthur Scargill?s project.

Five years ago Scargill launched a new independent party, a project that was initially supported by thousands of activists. Instead of trying to build a mass democratic party, King Arthur believed that he needed to create his own private club in which he excluded everybody that he could not control.

These actions have culminated in a bad electoral performance. Arthur Scargill?s statement on the SLP results is full of false claims. He boasts that his party ?contested 114 seats - more seats than any other single left political party in the history of the elections of the UK - and secured 57,497 votes, an increase of 11.34% compared with our party?s vote in the general election in May 1997? Weekly Worker June 14). In 2001 the SLP stood in almost twice as many constituencies as 1997, but it only got 5,400 votes more. In 1997, when Blair was at his peak of popularity, the SLP achieved 814 votes per constituency, while in 2001, when discontent against Blair is growing, the SLP was reduced to 504 votes per constituency: a drop of more than 35%!

In 1997 Scargill and two other SLP candidates saved their deposits. This time only one out 114 candidates surpassed the five percent barrier. This means that he has to pay the capitalist state a huge amount of money for the other 113 seats. Scargill himself obtained less than half the votes that he got when he stood in 1997. In 2001 he achieved less than 2.5% contesting against Mandelson.

A lot of Scargill?s statement concentrated on the claim that the SLP did better than a ?disparate? alliance. In fact in England and Wales the SA achieved more votes standing in less constituencies than the SLP. The SSP, standing only in Scotland, achieved almost 20,000 more votes and double the percentage of the SLP. Scargill was badly defeated. His image, albeit declining, still attracts some attention. But the man who once claimed that his party was the fourth largest in Britain saw it finish behind at least a dozen other parties.

The SA should persist in asking the SLP to enter its ranks and the SA?s own significant advance should help it undermine Scargill?s sectarianism. Despite lacking a national figure like Scargill, the SA achieved better results and organised more supporters.

The SLP still has some support amongst trade unionists and Stalinists. But on the far left there is only one tiny sect that is still backing them. When the SLP was launched the Spartacists did not want to fight inside it for their positions. From outside the party they supported Scargill against all the left tendencies, including their former comrades from the International Bolshevik Tendency. Now, for these elections, the Spartacists became the SLP?s great ?Trotskyite? apologists.

The Spartacists voted against Labour and the SA: ?We urge a vote for the SLP which is running an independent working class campaign that draws a class line, however crudely, against the Labour Party.? The Spartacists claimed that the SLP were the only ones who called for no vote to Labour. However, inside the SA there were many forces that did not vote Labour (SP, CPGB). The SSP stood against every Labour candidate in Scotland and Socialist Alternative stood against ?left? Labour MPs. The reasons why the Spartacists voted against the SP, CPGB and SSP candidates has nothing to do with the argument of ?only voting for working class candidates that don?t back Labour?. It is linked to an incredible sectarianism and a belief that the rest of the so-call Marxist groups are their main competitors and should be smashed.

The refusal of the SLP and Spartacists to make any united front or even electoral compromise showed deep sectarianism. Behind their hostility to the Socialist Alliance remains the idea that Scargill should be the only king of the left and that the Spartacists should be the only Marxist sect on the block.

A democratic, Marxist and working class attitude should be precisely the opposite. Despite the differences, we needed to build a broad-based movement capable of creating a pole of attraction against Blairism. If Scargill had not been so dictatorial, the SLP could have developed into a real force. And, in these elections, if the SLP had not been so exclusionist, the left would not had lost deposits in so many constituencies.

More importantly, a more effective movement could have been set up. A front between the SLP and the SA based on the common struggle against privatisation and the defence of working class demands would not only have achieved better results, but would have created a significant pole of attraction for Labour activists.

The Socialist Alliance must launch a political offensive aimed at the SLP in order to push it into a united front.

SLP failure
SLP failure

Bad results

Comrades, our Socialist Alliance election results were bad. Our average percentage was pitiful and that is fighting in our best (sic) seats.

To rewrite the SA?s first post-election comment - Neil Thompson in St Helens only got seven percent. Dave Nellist only got seven percent. Comrades, Weyman Bennett with 3.7% in Tottenham and Candy Udwin in Holborn and St Pancras with 3.1% is poor, not good. Good candidates, but we were annihilated. We were put well in the shade by the Greens, the Socialist Labour Party beat us in some places and in others were not far behind (despite them doing very little work). The BNP have significant support in some areas - a lot more than socialists.

We fought hard. In terms of activity, every SA supporter does five to10 times what the average Labour Party member does. But our results were dire and to talk it up, like with last year?s GLA elections, does us no favours. We worked hard in our constituency (Leyton and Wanstead, east London) and delivered three leaflets to doors that received no Lib Dem or Tory ones. We had a good candidate who built a profile. We had local media coverage only second to Labour. We never saw the Greens, but were beaten by them when we scraped in with 2.5%.

So what is the answer? Let me break with the usual responses from comrades - I don?t know. But I do know that no one else knows either, despite the grand theories. We are not connecting electorally at all despite the significant amount of support for socialist ideas that recent developments in unions like CWU, PCS and FBU indicate.

So why don?t we tell the truth? In an organisation in which 90% would describe themselves as revolutionary socialists, communists - whatever - why did we campaign on a manifesto that is very similar to Labour?s in 1983 - left reformist? We want to expropriate the railways, not nationalise them.

Comrades say we don?t want to scare away Labour Party members. In my constituency there seemed to be some concern amongst comrades that we should not go for the ?leftish? Labour MP?s jugular. I don?t think that is right. We need to attract current and former Labour voters, and those antipathetic and apathetic to voting. With honourable exceptions we need to be wary of LP members, especially current and former councillors who cut services merrily. It was bad enough with the Bennites when I was wasting my time in the LP to the mid-80s. What sort of person is active in the LP nowadays?

The best things that came out of the SA were working together and the absence of sectarianism. It should continue, comrades, and, if only for our very modest strength, we should be in a single party.

For a united, revolutionary party and programme. What have we got to lose?

Bad results
Bad results

Bad results

Comrades, our Socialist Alliance election results were bad. Our average percentage was pitiful and that is fighting in our best (sic) seats.

The best things that came out of the SA were working together and the absence of sectarianism. It should continue, comrades, and, if only for our very modest strength, we should be in a single party.

For a united, revolutionary party and programme. What have we got to lose?

Bad results
Bad results

Where now for the SSP?

The Scottish Socialist Party polled around 73,000 votes, or 3.5% of the vote, in the general election, standing in all 72 constituencies. It was not the 100,000 votes hoped for, but compared favourably to the 40,000 received at the last election. The target is for eight MSPs in 2003.

The positive side of it lay in comrades from different traditions of the left campaigning alongside each other for the same party for the first time in our lifetimes. The downside lay in the absence of canvassing - something which would have added to the number of votes polled and, more importantly, the number of people who could have been persuaded to consider becoming actively involved.

This is an issue which has to be democratically debated within the party structures and a majority vote respected, whichever way it goes, before the next election. Clearly socialists should want to address specific doubts and arguments of working class people in the only period where we can legitimately knock on people?s doors and talk about political ideas.

On the issue of democracy in the newly merged party it is important that each individual member thinks through how the SSP can function effectively while not giving up one?s right to criticise a policy, slogan, tactic he/she does not agree with. There must be accountability by all in the structures of the SSP, and in the first place to the branch.

Any platform that only campaigns on issues or ideas where it has a majority and where its ideas coincide with the position of the broader party will cause rifts, and relations between comrades to deteriorate. A split would become inevitable (every action has a reaction). If members can be seen to be campaigning for issues in which they are/were in a minority, then there is a likelihood of reciprocity and improved relations.

This might sound obvious, but the reality of not canvassing and contact lists remaining within the confines of one platform demonstrates that the concepts of consistent democracy and accountability are not lived ideas.

After the election we will all be pressing for the SSP to be involved in different issues: anti-capitalist protests, raising the profile of the SSP in workplaces (and the guards? strike would be a good place to start), Faslane, etc. But sticking by the internal mechanisms within the SSP will allow genuine left unity, which will ensure long-term success.

Where now for the SSP?
Where now for the SSP?