Letters

First Campism

Reading Manny Neira’s open letter, I have to say that I think the CPGB’s break with the AWL is a positive development, whatever its precise causes. At a time of dramatically increased US-British military aggressiveness and atrociousness, the AWL’s first campism is perverse, if not actually dangerous.

As far as I am concerned, the AWL has no place in anything remotely claiming to be the ‘left’.

First Campism
First Campism

All Irish

Does Graeme Kemp’s scornful rejection of a united Ireland also translate as a repudiation of the prospect of workers’ unity in Ireland (Letters, June 5)? Although he indicates that a united Ireland is an “impossible demand”, he is positively sanguine about the prospect of the unionists mounting an armed struggle against a secular Irish state in which they would be a significant and influential minority. Wake up to reality, Mr Kemp!

I believe that Irish unity can only properly come about through the Irish working class uniting behind a campaign for a socialist republic of Ireland. Sinn Féin, which is rooted in the working class areas of Belfast and Derry, needs to adopt a more outward socialist stance and not worry too much about losing American support. The support they receive at home is far more important.

Working class unionists have also to understand that they have much more in common with their working class catholic neighbours than with David Trimble or indeed Elizabeth Windsor. In this transitional phase towards working class unity, they should in their own interests reject Trimble and Paisley, who are nothing short of their class enemies. There is a real need for the emergence of class politics in protestant working class areas, even if it is unionist in flavour.

Graeme Kemp raises an old imperialist canard: that a liberated people mimics its oppressor. The example of South Africa nails this lie. Whites warned that majority rule would result in blacks avenging themselves on whites. This did not happen. Some white Afrikaners warned that if majority rule became a reality, they would mount an armed struggle to resist it. This did not happen either.

Ireland is no longer the priest-ridden catholic island it was perceived to be in De Valera’s time. Ulster’s unionists know this. However, in Britain, protestantism is enshrined in the very fabric of the British state. The genie that inhabits the Ulster unionist bottle is not religious bigotry, but a form of racism which has its origins in Britain’s imperial past. This anti-Irish racism has been perpetuated among protestants by semi-masonic organisations like the Orange Order.

In reality there is no difference between the protestants and catholics of the north of Ireland. They are all Irish. British culture is so widespread and predominant in terms of the English language and way of life in Ireland that it is nonsense for unionists to talk about preserving their ‘British’ way of life. So let’s not pretend that there is some wide cultural gap between catholics and protestants.

What we are left with, however, is a bloody mess created by British imperialism through the establishment of a sectarian statelet in the north. The clearing up of that mess is now long overdue.

All Irish
All Irish

SACP

I thought that ‘Politically correct Thatcherites’ was a very good article, exposing the politics of the South African Communist Party (June 12). I would like to share a couple of other thoughts.

First, when the US imperialists attacked Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, they were supported by the African National Congress, but opposed by the SACP. I don’t believe the SACP ever criticised their ANC allies on this point. For those SACPers who are also members of the ANC, they are members of one organisation that supported the war and another that condemned it.

Also, those parties on the left here in the USA that support the ANC did not to my knowledge ever criticise the ANC position on the war. The Socialist Workers Party’s position on the ANC/SACP is particularly strange, since it supports the ANC but denounces the SACP as “Stalinists”.

It is interesting to note that the ANC is a full member of the Socialist International, which consists of 141 seemingly disparate parties. These include not just social democrats, but also parties that once claimed to be Marxist, such as Frelimo in Mozambique, the MPLA in Angola (observer status) and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The one thing that unites these organisations is that none of them actually believe in socialism!

So it can be said that those SACPers who are members of the ANC are also members of the Socialist International along with Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

SACP
SACP

War against euro

Your readers may like to go to http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html, as this gives the real reason for the recent war with Iraq: Iraq was pricing oil in euros! This is a fascinating article, giving solid reasons why US imperialism is terrified that Opec in general will start pricing oil in euros. If and when that happens the euro will have replaced the dollar as the world’s currency and US imperialism will have lost a vital and irreplaceable tool.

It is interesting that Iran is also now considering pricing oil in euros - hardly surprising given their antipathy to the USA. Hence the bellicose noises coming from the Pentagon regarding that country too.

War against euro
War against euro

British Workers

Jean Kysow’s article, ‘Forget SWP, forget Communist Party’, highlights the problem that thousands of working class people are faced with when they realise that voting Labour is no longer a good option for them (June 12). If there is no obvious alternative many voters will drop out of voting altogether.

The constant disagreements between the parties that make up the Socialist Alliance have destroyed any chance that grouping may have had of becoming a mass party. Regular reports in the Weekly Worker confirm that the SA has developed into what I can only describe as a squabble shop. The working class in Britain has already rejected the individual parties that make up the SA. Ganging together just to fight elections can never work, because Joe Public knows that the same old faces with the same old ideas are pulling the strings.

Many of us saw the Socialist Labour Party as a viable alternative to the Labour Party. Unfortunately, that dream has also faded: the SLP made no effort to become a mass working class party and is now nothing more than an extra branch of the Stalin Society.

The SA and the SLP have lost all momentum and direction and it’s time to ditch them. Clearly, the British voters have no time for either of them. We need a new mass party to represent the working class in our country, a party that considers the needs of the British workers, the unemployed and pensioners before all others. The BNP have been doing this for years and their results in local elections prove that they got their sums right.

British Workers
British Workers

Start local

It is obvious that the Socialist Alliance is going the way of the SLP. The result of the North Tyneside mayoral by-election - Socialist Alliance; 400 votes; National Front: 2000-plus votes - shows the dead end the Socialist Workers Party is leading us into. The SWP’s slogans used in the campaign - ‘Asylum is a right’, ‘Defend asylum-seekers’ and ‘Asylum-seekers welcome here’ - will get us nowhere, hence the vote for the NF.

The way to overcome the NF and the BNP is not to dish up the warmed-over policies of post-World War II social democracy. What is required is the linking of bread and butter demands such as an emergency programme of house-building and repair to the need for world revolution. A world revolution would put an end to wars and conflict and result in the rapid development of poorer economies, where no one would need to seek asylum in the UK.

A few comrades and myself have set up the Fenland Workers Party and we have just received the approval of the electoral commission. I suggest the pro-workers’ party SA members set up their local equivalents. Such local workers’ parties could then come together to form a new national workers’ party.

Let’s leave the members of the SWP to be big fish in their little SA pond.

Start local
Start local

Burnt out

What is it that actually burns out a comrade? Following my response to comrade Power, I’ve given it some thought (Letters, June 12).

There are no doubt as many factors as there are cynical ex-commies slumped in armchairs. But I believe that it ultimately comes down to frustration with the ‘establishment’ that runs the sects, parties and groups. They insist on making disagreement over theory more important than the revolution.

In effect many young comrades are led to despair at the conservatism of self-appointed central committees, British ‘Lenins’ and the bold claims to be the vanguard of the proletariat by one-man-and-his-dog groups who make Wolfie Smith’s Tooting Popular Front look serious.

The demand to conform to an ideological world view that these sects make is also a strain on the more intelligent and questioning amongst us, for whom Marx’s phrase about the world in camera obscura seems to apply with perfect irony to the sects who claim to adhere to Marxism.

To be faced with the challenge of changing the world is one thing; to find that the culture of the people who want to change it also needs to change is another. There has been patient work mainly by the CPGB (PCC) over recent years that has helped to bring about a Socialist Alliance, but as yet there is little evidence of it being something all sects would commit to fully.

The sects are in the way - optimistically events will sweep them away. But whether a party would emerge from the ashes is less certain: the remains of, say, the SWP’s liquidation would drift off with their world view shattered like most of the members of the old CPGB/Workers Revolutionary Party/Militant.

The fight for the Socialist Alliance to become something more is one that can awaken old burnt out types like me. The call for a paper is a crucial step: it should be a bold one - nothing less than a daily paper for the alliance and its 70,000 or so voters.

British politics are showing signs of beginning to polarise. More and more the public are feeling unrepresented by the Labour government. The BNP has capitalised and won local elections. The Tories show no signs of being able to challenge Blair effectively, although Labour’s involvement in an imperialist adventure over in Iraq was seriously unpopular.

This is a prime time for the left to make a move, but unfortunately the conservative slumber of the sects keeps us down. If the campaign for an alliance paper and full party cannot be won, then it is only our enemies who can prosper, however many people picked up SWP membership cards at the big anti-war demo.

I would urge a tactic less patient and diplomatic than those being employed. The Socialist Alliance’s leadership should be set a deadline by petition of the branches, that states that if a paper is not in print by that date, then the minority will move to publish in the name of the alliance.

Burnt out
Burnt out

SWP arrogance

The sheer arrogant bureaucratic insolence of the SWP puppet executive of the Socialist Alliance, as shown in its refusal to coopt Phil Pope, is breathtaking.

The SWP first crudely foisted a ‘winner-takes-all’ system of election on the SA, which is in blatant violation of the very idea of a voluntary alliance of autonomous groups, wilfully provoking a major split in the process. Then, by its own admission, it utterly botched its own shamefaced attempt to give the process a thin facade of democratic legitimacy by managing to ensure only one slate was even presented to the conference.

So now, having made a perfunctory apology, the puppet executive refuses to make even one single gesture of concession to the all-too-trusting independent minority by coopting one token independent. And why? Because “this could be seen to undermine the decisions of conference”! No wonder the treasurer of the SA, following in the footsteps of the previous chair, has resigned, in sheer disgust.

Can anyone still retain any faith in the future of a ‘Socialist Alliance’ which has been cynically strangled in the cradle by a narrow, politically feeble, sectarian clique? We must all now intensify our work in the trade unions to promote the growth of a real mass democratic campaigning socialist movement, strong enough to sweep the sects aside and give proper representation to the interests of the working class and the anti-capitalist youth.

SWP arrogance
SWP arrogance

AWL exit strategy

Welcome though Manny Neira’s letter is, insofar as it makes clear that there are people in the CPGB who don’t make Alliance for Workers’ Liberty membership a justification for abuse as people who ‘hate Arabs’, there are many inaccuracies in his account of the relations between the AWL and the CPGB (‘Abandon sectarian doctrine’, June 12).

The tack of the CPGB is to portray the AWL as being on an isolationist course. Why? Because we use the term ‘fake socialists’ for those who are not embarrassed by Galloway’s politics. But using Manny’s own phrases, Galloway’s politics are the “the politics of supporting Arab dictatorships”. What else can one be, other than “embarrassed” about being associated with such politics. So that can’t be the issue, can it?

Despite the untruths printed in the pages of Weekly Worker by the more factional of its contributors, we have never supported or advocated Galloway’s expulsion from the Labour Party. But George Galloway is not new to politics. He has had an opportunity to forge a relationship with leftwing forces on all sort of issues for decades. But, unlike Simpson, Corbyn and many other Labour MPs, he has not. Instead he has attempted to become the mouthpiece of many discredited Arab regimes. When he opposes the war it is because that is his starting point. He is not and should not be our spokesperson at trade union conferences or elsewhere.

But enough about Galloway: he is only a symptom of what is so bad about the SA and the CPGB’s coverage of it. There are wider issues regarding the CPGB’s portrayal of ourselves within the SA. The CPGB argue we have an exit strategy from the SA. Well, it is no secret that the AWL, as well as any serious independent in the SA, is having to consider the increasing need to act independently of the SA on the issue of an election strategy.

The SA is now overwhelmingly dominated by an SWP which is acting with ever increasing arrogance: we would be damned fools to do anything different. We do not advocate people leaving the SA. We do advocate people seriously and energetically engaging with the large number of dissenting voices in the labour movement who could not be blamed for believing that the SA is nothing other than an SWP front.

So, other than the fact that we may say more than people want to hear on Galloway, or that we advocate, as we have always done, closer attention to the political fight within the affiliated trade unions, where is the evidence of this isolationist course or of sectarian politics? There are serious issues dividing the CPGB from the AWL (I’m not sure that we would ever have described our position vis-à-vis the CPGB as a rapprochement - although I know the CPGB have often reported it in those terms).

But if there is a disagreement growing between us it is not because we have been insensitive to the attention span of others regarding Galloway. It is because the CPGB policy of keeping the SA together by making political concessions to the flights of fancy of the SWP, whilst being continually organisationally slapped in the face by them, is becoming a less tenable strategy. If we are impatient with the CPGB and sections of the independents, it is because of your inability to see what is happening and draw the necessary conclusions.

I personally am perplexed by the CPGB’s sustained endorsement of so much of the SWP’s opportunism. You hint you are against ‘people and justice’ candidates, but see nothing wrong either with (1) advocating ‘people’s assemblies’ against the war - built not on the working class movement but, in a large part, religious institutions; or (2) with building an anti-war alliance that propels a small fundamentalist grouping, the Muslim Association of Britain, into the forefront of political life. Your comrades repeat the worst of the SWP’s slanders in their attempts to prevent people critically evaluating such actions.

As Iranian oppositionists mobilise against the Khamenei regime, will the CPGB still advocate that we continue to make common cause with those who in their press advocate the execution or imprisonment of people who renounce the islamic faith or the dismantling of sharia law?

You repeat the SWP’s superficial sneer that in advocating a mass workers’ party based on the trade unions we wish to “rerun the 20th century by recreating the Labour Party”. The breadth of our call for workers’ representation and a workers’ party is indeed different to your own. On your web pages you give a subheading of ‘Declaration for an SA party’ to an article on the statement of the May 3 Committee. Even if the SA was at the headiest period of its optimism, calling for an SA party would be a ridiculous ultimatum to put in front of the growing opposition developing in the trade unions.

We have attempted to put our view as concisely as we can in the Network for Working Class Political Representation. We still await a serious reply from you on this and other issues.

AWL exit strategy
AWL exit strategy