Letters

Queer equality

Queer emancipation involves much more than equal rights. Equality? No thanks! I have bigger, brighter, better aspirations. Why would anyone want equal rights in our flawed society, where injustice is rife? Surely that would mean equal injustice for all? Let’s face it, equal rights may be the cherished mantra of liberals and leftwingers, but in reality it is usually second best. Instead of opting for equal rights within our present unjust society, why not aim for a different kind of society, based on justice and human rights for everyone?

All minorities suffering social exclusion face a dilemma: to assimilate into the status quo or to push for the transformation of society. As a gay man, I loathe homophobic discrimination. But I also dislike the way most of the queer community has dumbed down its horizons to the limited goal of equal rights. Whatever happened to the lofty ideals of queer liberation and sexual freedom? Ending anti-gay bias will not solve all the problems faced by queers. Some of our difficulties arise not from homophobia, but from the more general herotophobic and sex-negative nature of contemporary culture, which also harms heterosexuals. These destructive puritanical attitudes are evident in the witchhunting of consensual under-age sex, the censorship of sexual imagery, the inadequacy of sex education lessons, and the criminalisation of sex workers and consensual sadomasochistic relationships.

Isn’t it obvious? Equality for queers is a political deal that leads to social assimilation. As a condition of equal treatment, queers are expected to conform to the straight system, adopting its norms and aspirations. The end result is gay cooption and invisibilisation. We get equality, but the price we pay is the surrender of our unique, distinctive queer identity, lifestyle and values - the important insights and ethics that we have forged in response to exclusion and discrimination by a hostile straight world.

Queer equality within the status quo is a flawed version of freedom. It betrays both queers and straights alike. Society - not us - needs to change. This social transformation is the key to meaningful queer liberation. Equality, yes. But on the basis of a new and different kind of society where there are wider, more expansive human rights for people of all sexualities. It is time to rediscover the vision thing. That means daring to imagine what society could be, rather than accepting society as it is.

Queer equality
Queer equality

Why so shy?

Thanks for your coverage of the CPB’s Communist University weekend school. I saw it advertised in the Morning Star - the so-called “daily paper of the left” - a few weeks ago, but was surprised to find no mention of it in that paper afterwards. Is the Morning Star not associated with the CPB? Maybe the editors did not think it important enough to include. Comrade Andrew Murray recently asked in its pages whether we can build a left alternative to New Labour. This is an important question which should have been discussed at the CPB’s school, and those discussions should have been reported. The failure of the Morning Star to do so is inexplicable.

Why so shy?
Why so shy?

Clampdown

On June 17, in a coordinated action, 1,200 ‘anti-riot’ police attacked the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) and the National Council of Resistance headquarters in France and arrested nearly 150 of its leaders and members. The French government has called this an act against ‘terrorism’. If the French government is truly concerned about terrorism, it must shut down the embassies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surveillance network in France.

It must end its support and dealings with the islamic regime of Iran. The French government’s action is a clear attack on the opposition of the Islamic Republic. It is clear collusion with the criminal islamic regime of Iran - and that too at a time when the people of Iran are on the street to overthrow it. The Worker-communist Party of Iran strongly condemns the French government’s actions and demands that it release all the detainees. The WCPI calls on all opposition forces to strongly condemn the action of the French government, irrespective their closeness to or distance from the PMOI.

Clampdown
Clampdown

AWL and George

I am grateful to comrade Pete Radcliff of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty for his reply to my ‘open letter’ (Weekly Worker June 12).

First, a small point: Pete notes “many inaccuracies in [my] account of the relations between the AWL and the CPGB”, but doesn’t actually specify them (Letters, June 19). If I’ve made any factual errors, I apologise, but what actually were they? Pete clearly disagrees with my description of the AWL’s course as “isolationist”, and this may be all he means. In any event, isolationism, or rather its opposite, unity, lies at the heart of the debate, so this point I can take up.

Pete wrote: “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 the Weekly Worker by the more factional of its contributors, we have never supported or advocated Galloway’s expulsion from the Labour Party. But ... [he] is not and should not be our spokesperson at trade union conferences or elsewhere.”

Now, either I’ve made a terrible job of explaining my view or (and I hope Pete will forgive the suspicion) the AWL just cannot take ‘yes’ for an answer! Assuming the former, let me try again:

I agree: George Galloway’s politics are essentially Arab nationalist. His anti-US imperialism takes the form of supporting a dictatorship (and not the working class it oppresses) as the primary force against the unfolding ‘new American century’ project.

I agree: these are not the politics I wish to see supported by a new workers’ party, or presented to the British working class. I would oppose the rumoured Socialist Workers Party attempts to create a popular front with Galloway, Arab nationalists, islamists and the Communist Party of Britain. We are communists and class fighters, not nationalists or religionists of any kind.

I agree: I do not think Galloway should be expelled from the Labour Party. As for The Telegraph, if I said the AWL had allied themselves with this reactionary bourgeois rag they would doubtless consider this a slander. They understand, as I do, that The Telegraph’s attacks are not motivated by concern over the lack of a class base to his politics: the idea is ridiculous. The Telegraph hates the anti-war movement, and despises Galloway for supporting it and for calling on soldiers to disobey orders.

Neither the war criminals leading the Labour Party nor their apologists in the bourgeois press should find any allies amongst revolutionaries. Our criticisms of Galloway are (naturally) aimed at that part of his politics we oppose; their criticisms are based on that part we support. We defend him against the latter, and criticise the former. This is what we mean by critical defence.

Now, I have strenuously defended the AWL against the charge that they have allied themselves with our class enemy in attacking Galloway. Surely I was not wrong to do so? But if the AWL’s attack is not that of the bourgeoisie, and they defend him against moves to expel him from Labour, then is that not critical defence? Has not the difference been one of emphasis? And are we really going to refuse to cooperate in the campaign our class desperately needs for independent representation on such grounds?

Pete refers to the AWL alternative, the ‘Network for Working Class Political Representation’. After the packed Socialist Alliance pro-party fringe meeting, the ‘launch’ attracted only 15 AWL members and four others. I can do little better than quote one of those four, the Revolutionary Democratic Group’s Peter Morton:

“Comrade Thomas concluded his remarks by stating that the AWL should map out a positive political platform around which people can organise to retrieve what the SA was originally about: eg, to put up ‘independent working class socialist candidates’. This opened the way for the first motion to be put, by comrade Matgamna - which is where I became confused. Was I in a meeting to decide AWL policy, or was I unwittingly being inducted into an AWL front, to rival any CWP [Campaign for a Workers’ Party] initiatives currently being worked out?

“Steve Freeman argued for unity between the pro-party groups (AWL, CPGB, RDG), but comrade Matgamna replied that these are propaganda groups who cannot unite if they are putting out radically different propaganda.

“The meeting took a short break and when we returned voting took place. The RDG elected not to vote (including not abstaining), as we did not want to endorse the process that it may now be claimed was taking place in that room.”

At a time when Labour has abandoned the class which created it, and the SWP is dragging the SA into popular frontism, those of us who share the CPGB’s and AWL’s belief in independent working class politics wish to act, rather than leaving working class communities to the tender mercies of the British National Party.

If the SA is being hijacked, let us fight back! There are class fighters in the SWP: let us take the campaign to them too. And of course, we must take the argument out beyond the SA - to the union branches, the workplaces and the streets. But to do this we need a campaign to fight for and a paper to cohere that campaign, and the AWL and the CPGB could be producing it now. I repeat my call to every AWL member: question whether the reasons you are being offered justify our continued paralysis. Let us act.

AWL and George
AWL and George

'Fake left'

According to Wendell Payne, “the AWL has no place in anything remotely claiming to be the ‘left’” (Letters, June 19). Apparently, this is because of our “first campism”.

Perhaps Wendell could elaborate on this for me, because I just don’t see it. Are we ‘first campists’ (essentially pro-imperialist) because we opposed the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein as well as the vicious imperialist war waged by the US-UK? Have we abandoned the working class because we oppose popular frontist collaboration with fundamentalists who advocate the execution of those who convert away from or leave the islamic religion? Have we ended up in the ‘first camp’ because we believe that socialists have a duty of solidarity to the international working class, and not to its oppressors or its oppressors’ apologists like George Galloway?

I am a member of the AWL not because I am a cheerleader for imperialism, but because I am a socialist and I believe that the fight for working class solidarity is absolutely central to the fight for socialism. The left has become irrelevant to so much of the class because it has lost its foundations - foundations that belong firmly in the struggle of the working class. As far as unity is concerned, I will work alongside any comrade who knows that it is from the class struggle that socialism will be built, and who wishes to re-anchor the left firmly within that struggle.

When we speak of the “fake” or “pseudo” left, we mean those people who have forgotten the class and have placed in its stead whatever it considers to be the most suitably ‘anti-imperialist’ entity - be it islamic fundamentalism, apologism for brutal regimes such as Hussein’s, or cross-class popular fronts. Surely it is these people - people who have abandoned the working class - who have “no place in anything remotely claiming to be the ‘left’”?

'Fake left'
'Fake left'

Not gossip

As far as ‘Weapon, not notice board’ is concerned, I read the Weekly Worker because it is engaged in a process of clarification of many left ideas (June 19).

It has many points of similarity to the tradition on the left I come from - notably on Europe and the Middle East, where the CPGB publishes democratic communist views, similar to the original First International Marxism. Personally, as a jaded leftist, I know enough left “gossip” without having to read any paper.

Comrades tell me that they also read the Weekly Worker for its genuine development of Marxist views (which in the detail one does not always agree with).

Not gossip
Not gossip

Keep printing

Though not particularly sympathetic to the CPGB’s politics, I often make it a point to glance at the Weekly Worker. The first thing I punch up is the letters column. I suspect a number of other ‘old leftists’ do likewise.

Most leftist sects these days have little idea of what it means to engage in an argument. They seem positively indignant when a mere statement of their views fails to command instant approbation; when challenged, they usually repeat themselves - more loudly and stridently. Polemics with other groups often amount to no more than name-calling.

Your letters column cannot accommodate extended arguments; the letters are of uneven quality and too frequently concerned with intricacies of British politics not easily grasped from where I sit. But ideas are exchanged and debates are had. In the comatose condition of today’s far left, the smallest signs of life are encouraging.

Your letters column is one such sign. Keep printing it!

Keep printing
Keep printing

Too middle class

The problem with the left is that it is too middle class. The revolutionary socialist movement is severely hindered by a significant presence of middle class people who wouldn’t go near a council estate, preferring to unload the guilt of their backgrounds by wallowing in intra-left rhetoric, patronising us and boosting their own egos.

Knowing the theory is all very well, but if you can’t relate to the experiences, culture and circumstances of working class people, you’re pissing in the wind. History has provided some notable exceptions, such as Marx, Lenin, and Tony Benn. But such figures are few and far between.

George Thorne’s assertion that the BNP is representing working class interests is treacherous (Letters, June 19). That party’s fine for scabs, football hooligans, Nazis, fascists, rapists, convicted bombers, gun-runners, race-haters; and the disillusioned drawn into Nick ‘Cambridge-educated, lives off inherited income’ Griffin’s big plan for ‘intellectual fascism’ (surely a contradiction?). But for the class, it is a Trojan horse that would lead to our ultimate paralysis.

We need a working class party that is controlled by the rank and file, not some central committee. It should be based in communities, not middle class universities or cross-class anti-war movements. It should be internationalist and revolutionary, but not weighed down by dogma. To be effective, it would engage and work within the class, rather than bellowing counterproductive liberal slogans like ‘Asylum-seekers welcome here’. It would recognise that prioritising paper sales and recruiting members is not a viable plan of action for making an impact amongst the class.

If the sympathetic middle classes want to help out, they should try to change the anti-working class ideas of people in their own class, rather than patronising us and damaging the credibility of socialist ideas.

Too middle class
Too middle class

Don't trust 'em

Though I was a little surprised to see a letter from a supporter of the BNP in your paper, there were a few grains of truth in the Stockport fascist’s analysis of the British left.

I spent the 1980s as an activist in Militant, plus two years in the Socialist Labour Party in the in the mid-1990s, and have come to realise that all such groups are organically incapable of growing beyond a certain point because a real mass movement inevitably challenges their dominant ideology, and that will always be a threat to the fragile psychology of the self-appointed leaders of such groups.

Whilst I recognise that the CPGB is better than most, and I enjoy reading the Weekly Worker, it is my opinion that all that you hold dear - ie, the Party, the central committee, democratic centralism, the paper, Marxist-Leninist ideology - are merely alternative systems of control to those currently practised by the ruling world capitalist elite.

The masses in all but the most backward nations will never trust power to one of many so-called vanguard groups on offer, because they know instinctively that, were they to do so, life would be even less free and joyous than it is now. Banding together in some kind of meta-vanguard Socialist Alliance will not change this.

The disparate worldwide anti-globalisation movement is broadly on the right lines. Don’t trust leaders and parties. The people can show their power by such means as taking to the streets in their millions on issues like the recent war. By not playing the consumer game - ie, boycotting companies, not buying brands, buying second hand, making their own stuff, swapping, forming cooperatives, growing their own food, developing their own media as a forum for independent discussion, art and culture.

In short, we can practice human liberation now, not in some mythical future communist Shangri La. Be yourself. I’ve found that it is a lot more fun than trying to flog some dreary paper on a cold Saturday afternoon, or in engaging in endless discussion about the correct interpretation of Lenin’s shopping lists.

Don't trust 'em
Don't trust 'em