Letters

Confused

When Marx sat down to write the Communist manifesto, did he envisage the creation of the British Communist Party in its present state?

Do half the members of the communist movement understand his writings or appreciate the significance of his philosophical and political ideals? Why has the communist movement lost all support from the upper middle class and the intellectuals, who were central to Marx’s communist revolution?

The communist ideal can never take root unless it is first explained to all. We are now in a position for the true socialist ideals to emerge, but nobody exists to take advantage of this. Communism should be an all-embracing movement. Instead it has become a set of leftwing and entirely unacceptable series of self-serving policies.

Unity is craved by the masses and it is only socialism that can deliver this. When will the British communist parties stand up for a global trend that is surely the ultimate apex of human development?

I appreciate the ideological basis of this argument and I understand that the Communist Party has to evolve and adapt, but, by rejecting the very ideas that form the foundation of socialism, the movement is floundering and will surely fail.

Confused
Confused

Smear

It is strange that nowhere in the text of John Rees’s speech to conference is there a quotation that matches the headline you gave it: “Our members, our alliance” (Weekly Worker May 15). In fact, the message of the Rees speech is exactly the opposite of the smear tactic insinuation that the SWP is building a front group, rather than building a broad alliance with PCSU, RMT, FBU representatives.

CPGB sectarian dishonesty has reached yet another low.

Smear
Smear

Scum

Comrade Julie Waterson of the Socialist Workers Party says that only “scum” on the estates vote for the British National Party.

This ridiculous statement leads me to ask the question: has she or any other SWP leader ever visited the planet earth?

Scum
Scum

Hypocritical?

I have to admit that to me the grief we give to the Anti-Nazi League is hypocritical, for I see no action taken by our party against the far right. Maybe I’m wrong and the party is taking actions that I have not acknowledged. But the question I put is, are we doing enough against the right and are we doing anything better than the ANL we have so criticised?

Hypocritical?
Hypocritical?

Sean apologised

I read with interest the Weekly Worker’s report of the fringe meeting following the Socialist Alliance conference, which was attended by supporters of the defeated motion calling for the SA to pursue the aim of forming a workers’ party. I agree with the view expressed at that meeting by comrade John Bridge of the CPGB - that a genuine campaign for a worker’s party, based on a joint paper, would depend first and foremost on cooperation between the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

I can vouch that such cooperation has been exercised, and indeed has grown, in our SA work over the last year here in Manchester. It bore fruit in the convincing victories we won in South Manchester SA for the active boycott approach to a referendum on British membership of the European single currency and for the establishment of an SA newspaper. We are now cooperating in fighting the temporary bureaucratic gain made by the SWP, which - riding high after the conference outcome and the Preston election win - was able to mobilise its previously inactive members to a meeting which voted to break up SMSA.

The current schism between the leading comrades of the AWL and the CPGB needs to be healed in the interests of the British working class.

At the conference Sean Matgamna, the AWL’s leading comrade, approached me and apologised for calling me, in his ‘Critical notes on the CPGB’, “the CPGB’s most unreconstructed Stalinite”. He explained that he had been misinformed. Since Sean and I do not know each other personally, I had no hesitation in accepting this explanation and the apology unreservedly.

Sean had succeeded in demonstrating that nobody in our working class movement is too big to apologise. I suggest that comrade Jack Conrad, leader of my organisation, the CPGB, now apologises sincerely to comrade Matgamna for agreeing to stand in for the latter when he was removed from the platform at the Leeds meeting on Marxism and religion, organised by comrade Ray Gaston, vicar of All Hallows church. Jack can restate that he was misinformed - as he clearly was - about the reason that Sean was no longer to speak at Leeds. In response, I would expect that Sean will feel able to apologise for his statement that the CPGB had “politically mugged” him in this incident.

Our leaders have to lead in all respects. Sometimes this means leading in terms of the exercise of those most human attributes - humility and contrition.

Sean apologised
Sean apologised

AWL home

In a joint ‘Open letter to CPGB members’ in the latest issue of Solidarity, the generally dull and monotonal fortnightly published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, comrades Martyn Hudson and Lawrie Coombs bemoan the “abrupt and radical departures from the direction in which [the CPGB] seemed to be going after its break in the mid-1990s from old-style Stalinist attitudes on what it called the ‘bureaucratic socialist’ states and from vulgar ‘anti-imperialist’ positions on Ireland and Israel/Palestine” (May 14).

According to the authors, these “radical departures” help to explain the organisation’s “frantic zigzags” over “recent months”. For example, we are told that the CPGB, quite out of the blue, started arguing that “a victory for Saddam Hussein’s regime would be preferable to victory for the US/UK, and to call on Iraqi workers to ‘bring to the fore’ the struggle against the US/UK rather than against Saddam”, which supposedly was in “flat contradiction” to the “principled position” the organisation took over the post-September 11 Afghan war. Presumably, the Weekly Worker should have treated the recent Iraq war as a simple re-run of the Afghan war - business as usual, slogans as per normal, and wheel out the timeless truths.

Even worse, especially for those inclined to suffer from ortho-Trot relapses, has been the CPGB’s “general lurch towards popular-front-style politics” - symptoms of which, it seems, has been its refusal to frothily denounce the Muslim Association of Britain’s support for, and strong association with, the Stop the War Coalition, and the organisation’s enthusiasm for the ‘People’s Assembly’ initiative (which, as Solidarity readers are darkly reminded, was “billed to include representatives of churches, mosques, etc”). The disillusioned duo also claim to be very distressed by the fact that the CPGB has “rallied to the defence of George Galloway”, when he and the entire anti-war movement as a whole were coming under sustained and vicious attack from The Daily Telegraph, the Blairites and other such dregs.

“For these reasons we have ended our relationship with the CPGB,” comrades Hudson and Coombs inform us. Seeing how they naturally “remain committed to unity on the left”, both comrades have decided that the “best contribution” that is being made towards that noble end is “currently” to be found in the AWL.

What transparently self-justifying hogwash. You would have thought - hoped even - that the comrades could have cobbled together something a bit better than this, if only because at least one of them is a self-proclaimed intellectual. But at least, I suppose, it has the dubious merit of dutifully tracking the AWL line on the CPGB and will certainly make them favourite performers at the court of Sean Matgamna and Martin Thomas - and doesn’t everyone want to be loved and flattered?

However, as any serious reader of the Weekly Worker will tell you, comrades Hudson and Coombs’s thumbnail summary of the CPGB’s political development is comically ‘revisionist’ - merely playing to the Solidarity-reading gallery and all those kept sadly ignorant by years, probably decades, of AWL misinformation and general anti-CPGB bigotry. No, the real and getting-ever-so-slightly-distant origins of the CPGB/Weekly Worker group are to be found in a revolutionary faction/tendency operating on the extreme left of (world) ‘official communism’. This gave the comrades a distinct edge, you could contend, over those large swathes of ortho-Trotskyism which became effectively social democratised/Labourised - a grisly fate for any communist. The minority who did not become ‘greys’ seemed to devote most, if not all, of their (sometimes not inconsiderable) energy to conducting ferocious and near permanent fratricidal wars against the rival and competing sects/grouplets who inhabited the same primeval and noxious ortho-Trot swamp.

Finally, as a warm-hearted guy, I can only wish comrades Hudson and Coombs the best of luck in their new home. I am sure they will fit in well.http://www.workersliberty.org/node/919

AWL home
AWL home

Right of return

My article on Bush’s Palestine ‘road map’ in last week’s paper contains a formulation, as a result of some too consensual editing, that gives a slightly misleading impression of my position of one aspect of the Israel/Palestine question. In elaborating a perspective of a transitional two-state solution from below, the article states regarding the right to return of Palestinian refugees:

“There must be a right of all Palestinian refugees, from 1948 and after, to settle in either a Palestinian or the Israeli state - with the help of massive Israeli material aid to ensure a decent living standard. There must also be completely free movement of both peoples (albeit without state aid) between the two states, and perhaps in time a joint citizenship, as a prelude to a genuinely binational entity coming into being and thereby dissolving the initial separate states.”

The original draft, on the other hand, read:

“There must be a right of all Palestinian refugees, from 1948 and after, to be resettled in the Palestinian territory ceded by Israel with massive Israeli material aid to ensure genuine and full recompense (insofar as that is possible) and a decent living standard. There must also be complete free movement of both peoples (albeit initially without state aid) between the two states, and perhaps in time a joint citizenship, as a prelude to a genuinely binational entity coming into being and thereby dissolving the initial separate entities.”

The different content in this passage makes sense in conjunction with an earlier passage, also omitted from the article, that stated, regarding the question of compensation, including territorial compensation, to Palestinian refugees for their original dispossession: “Such a compensation must involve not just the territories, but a big swathe of Israeli land - and even more, it must involve the use of Israeli productive capacity to give the Palestinian refugees back a decent standard of life.”

The right of return, in terms of the simple right of refugees to live in the territory of their birth, is an absolute. But there are two aspects of this: there is the right to residence and indeed legal citizenship on the one hand, and then there is the other implicit meaning of the right to return, which is the right to ‘return’ to the social status enjoyed by the original Palestinians before the Naqba: ie, the dispossession of the Palestinians.

There is here a direct clash of material interests, since of course any attempt by returning Palestinians to repossess on an ad-hoc basis land and property that was originally seized from them in the expropriation of 1948 will immediately trigger off civil conflict with the Jewish population, and will likely lead to a fratricidal slaughter. Thus those, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who rule out the right of return because of its supposedly leading to an attack on the right to exist of Israel, are demagogically exploiting a real question, though their solution to it puts the prerogatives of the state of Israel above the basic democratic rights of the refugees.

However, justice for the Palestinians demands the reversal, insofar as this is possible without triggering off another catastrophe, of the Naqba, without creating a new injustice for the Jewish population and violating their rights as a nation. How are these two principles to be reconciled?

The solution is not so much ‘land for peace’, as the liberal Zionists propose, giving the Palestinians the 22% (at the most) of historic Palestine (ie, the West Bank and Gaza) that was not seized in 1948. Rather there must be a considerably different trade, of substantial Israeli land plus Israeli living conditions for all refugees, for an end to the national conflict. Justice demands the reversal of 1948 for the Palestinians, but justice for the Israeli people demands the right to stay and the right to self-determination, albeit not the right to oppress and dispossess the Arabs.

This means, as part of a system of democratic demands, that the right of return must be implemented, insofar as it has the second of the meanings talked about here, in a collective manner, with state aid, as part of an agreed compromise. Instead of a complete repossession of historic Palestine for the Palestinians, there has to be a partial repossession, to be fought for by the Israel working class in alliance with its Palestinian class brothers and sisters. This means the voluntary handing over of a large chunk of prime Israeli land and real estate (details to be determined by negotiations on the ground) to a Palestinian state, with the evacuation, again involving state aid, of those sections of that Jewish population of that territory who are not prepared to be ruled by such a Palestinian state.

The balance of Israeli territory being exchanged for the material benefits that the productive capacity of an attenuated lesser Israel can bring to a refounded greater Palestine seems to me the fairest, most equitable peace settlement that can be achieved. A Palestinian state confined to the currently occupied territories, quite rightly, will not satisfy Palestinian national aspirations and will therefore not solve the national question. Even in the best of conditions - a complete Israeli withdrawal, withdrawal of settlers, recovery of water rights, etc - it will be seen rightly as an impoverished semi-bantustan.

It seems to me that this is the only way that the two components of the right to return can be reconciled with the programme of the rights of both peoples to exist. The bare right of free movement, the right to re-enter the territory that is now Israel, live there, etc, must be an absolute right. But the right to re-appropriate, or re-expropriate, land and real estate seized in previous bouts of ethnic cleansing (for that is what 1948 was, irrespective of the mitigating circumstances that existed in the aftermath of the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe) must be organised and planned in a collective manner, by agreement between the peoples who have to coexist in this tragic situation. Collectively organised, this process can be kept under collective control. Uncontrolled, it could lead to yet another intercommunal disaster.

The whole tangle of democratic questions, and questions involving property rights, inherent in this situation poses questions that really point beyond capitalism and private property for their complete resolution. But for this potential to be realised, we have to make our democratic demands fit the objective situation as closely as possible.

Right of return
Right of return

Election farce

In his article about the Socialist Alliance executive elections, Marcus Ström mentions me as one of the “unlucky” nominees who didn’t make the slate (Weekly Worker May 15).

Actually, I was more surprised at being nominated than about not making it! The first thing I knew about it was when I saw my name on the screen, and I still don’t know who nominated me. Whoever it was, thanks for the compliment, comrades, and I hope you were not too disappointed.

What I did know, because they had asked me first, was that comrades of the Workers International (not the Workers International League) had nominated me for the appeals committee. I thought I could bring some experience and sense of fair play, with a commitment to furthering the Socialist Alliance and the working class. If elected I would be conscious of the trust placed in me.

I was surprised, as were the comrades who nominated me, to find there would be no chance of submitting to the vote, as conference was given but one option - a pre-selected slate. When we asked what had happened to other names, we were told that if you wanted anyone else you should have put forward an alternative slate. So it had been a waste of time putting forward my name - though the comrade was not told this when she submitted my nomination.

I don’t know how many other comrades might have similarly been excluded from consideration. We did not see any names but those of the slate chosen for us, before we went through the mere formality of a vote. I think this is a stupid way of proceeding, especially for a committee that is supposed to hear appeals from members, not to be itself an arena for factional conflict. I have no beef against the comrades on the appeals committee. Those I know are OK and I’ve already worked locally and got on fine with one of them. I am sure we could all work together on a committee.

Insisting that you either accept a slate or challenge the whole lot is hardly conducive to a constructive, comradely atmosphere. That I was not elected is not important. That we did not have a free election is. If this performance was a mistake, I hope the leading comrades involved will recognise it. Control-freakery and fixing among cliques can only discourage the rank and file enthusiasm the Socialist Alliance needs if it is to succeed.

Election farce
Election farce

Aggregate

I was disappointed with the report of our most recent CPGB aggregate (‘Partyist project continues’ Weekly Worker May 15). My recollection of the meeting was of a much more focused and positive affair than Mary Godwin portrays. While many opinions were raised, the CPGB is clear about the direction the struggle for partyism needs to take and the main sites for that struggle. To read comrade Godwin’s article would give the impression that our strategy lacks clear direction. This does not reflect reality.

While the article correctly states that our struggle for a democratic centralist Communist Party remains our main objective, it fails to reflect the meeting’s overall concretisation of this task. The Socialist Alliance in England and Wales and the Scottish Socialist Party remain our main areas of intervention. While we are critical of the SWP’s sectarian misleadership of the SA and the left nationalism of the SSP, in the absence of any other site of struggle for the principled democratic unity of the left and advanced workers we retain a partisan approach to these organisations.

Our main slogan should now be to campaign for a new workers’ party. As part of that, we should fight to ‘transform the Socialist Alliance’. Of course, we are not hidebound by the SWP misleadership. We retain the organisational and political freedom to work with other allies and to intervene independently. There are many areas of potential: the anti-war movement, the trade unions, the Labour Party, the European Social Forum.

In terms of my own contribution to the meeting, I feel the reporting of me as only referring to the independents as “flotsam” to be inaccurate. I agreed with comrade Mike Macnair that many of these comrades are our natural allies in a struggle for a positive partyist solution to the sectarian dead-end the left finds itself in. We look forward to working with non-aligned comrades in the struggle for a new workers’ party.

Aggregate
Aggregate