Letters

Crisis and opportunity

The article ?SWP seals expulsion of US organisation? exposes a crisis that the Socialist Workers Party leadership would prefer to be kept behind closed doors (Weekly Worker July 19).

It is excellent that the CPGB is using its paper and website to expose to the public gaze the various afflictions to do with leftwing politics. Particularly the Trotskyist movements based in Europe and the British Isles.

One man?s crisis is another man?s opportunity.

Crisis and opportunity
Crisis and opportunity

Soviet Nato

I was browsing through former Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko?s autobiography Memories, published in 1989, when I came upon a page relating to the application by the Soviet Union to join Nato at the Geneva conference in 1955.

Curiously, no reference to this application appeared in the British capitalist press in 1955. Even more curiously, no reference appeared in the British communist/socialist press either. However, nobody has denied the truth of Gromyko?s Memories.

Perhaps Nato and the Soviet Union had to be content with a love that dared not speak its name.

Soviet Nato
Soviet Nato

BNP problem exists

To suggest that the British National Party are gaining support because of their ?world view?, as Darrell Goodliffe argues in ?Class politics, not multiculturalism?, is misleading (Weekly Worker July 12).

In fact the BNP have made electoral progress (Tipton, Bexley, Oldham, etc) by concentrating on local working class issues. In Oldham their condemnation of anti-white attacks and proposals for housing segregation and a boycott of Asian businesses showed many in the white working class that unlike the other parties they were listening to their concerns and proposing radical solutions - albeit racist ones. The resulting 11,643 votes showed the effectiveness of their approach; and the left?s refusal to get involved with ?localist community work? meant that it was them that remained marginalised.

While Anti-Fascist Action would share the CPGB?s view that the left is isolated from the working class, it will take more than the adoption of a ?world view? to convince the working class that the left is relevant; especially if the programme is drawn up without any consultation with those working class communities that are looking for radical solutions.

The BNP?s tactic of being working class-friendly gets results. The left should try it some time. This is not to suggest that we believe the left should run around like headless chickens: rather that if as much preparation and planning was put into developing practical solutions to immediate working class problems as is being put into developing the ?world view?, then real progress could be made.

Like the BNP, who changed strategy back in 1994 because the old one wasn?t working, the left must realise it is time to change. The last 30 years have been spent looking inwards, trying to fine-tune a strategy that hasn?t worked.

To describe BNP supporters as ?atomised and ideologically confused plebeians and lumpenised elements of the working class? might fit some classical 1930s definition, but it is arrogant nonsense today. In the same way that the left continually try to dismiss the fascists for being small (compared to the left!), underestimating your opponents simply serves to disarm anti-fascists. How can you develop a solution to a problem if you deny the problem exists?

Darrell Goodliffe criticises those who ?blame the left? for the trouble in the north, but unless the left is prepared to accept its share of responsibility how can it be taken seriously? In general terms it is the failure of the left to fill the political vacuum in working class communities that has allowed reactionary organisations (black and white) to gain ground; and, specifically, if the Anti-Nazi League brings people on to the street (as in Bradford), but has no idea what they want to achieve, if that situation then leads to the working class being even more divided along racial lines than before, then they must be condemned.

BNP problem exists
BNP problem exists

KLA justice?

I refer to Ian Donovan?s article, ?Milosevic on trial? (Weekly Worker July 5).

While agreeing with 95% of its contents, I found myself having to reread the last paragraph. I have to say I found the Weekly Worker?s apparent admiration for the Kosova Liberation Army perplexing.

If it is wrong to hand Milosevic over to Nato to receive ?justice?, then it hardly follows that some sort of justice would be achieved by handing him over to the KLA - a gang of cut-throats and bandits, whose only aim is to turn Kosova into some sort of Afghanistan in the Balkans.

KLA justice?
KLA justice?

Forward to defeat

In no way did I state support for the far right, as Ethan Grech alleges (Letters, July 19). What I did state in my letter was that we should support those bourgeois policies which will ultimately, in the long term, aid the working class cause - as accepting the euro as the European currency will certainly do (Weekly Worker July 12).

Does comrade Grech fail to remember that one of the largest communist movements in Germany occurred in the severe depression before World War II, when proletarian conditions worsened dramatically due to declining wages and increasing unemployment?

Remember: it must get worse before it gets better!

Forward to defeat
Forward to defeat

Disarm police

On Friday July 20, a 200-strong demonstration was organised outside Brixton police station by the Movement for Justice and the Socialist Alliance to protest at the police killing of a man wielding a gun-shaped cigarette lighter.

There were clashes with the police and the result was a small riot. Some shops (like Adidas in Ferndale Road) were looted. Since that night a lot of policemen on horses and in special cars are patrolling Brixton. At the entrance of Angell estate (where the man was killed) there are two police vans patrolling.

Brixton, which is the centre of the Afro-Caribbean community, has a police force mainly composed by whites who have a strong racist traditions.

The people are demanding the disarmament of the police, although it would be important to raise the demand that the police (as a separate force from the population) should be dissolved and replaced by workers? guards democratically elected by and accountable to rank and file assemblies.

Disarm police
Disarm police