Letters

Correction

My report in last week’s Weekly Worker appears to suggest that comrade Jock Penman spoke to the capitalist press: “He told the News of the World …” (‘SW platform rift’, June 26).

This is not the case, nor was it in the original (ie, unedited) report. The News of the World and all the other papers that covered the story got the quotes as a result of a leaked document. There is no reason to believe that comrade Penman or any other comrade talked to the press.

Correction
Correction

Meetings galore

Since last year and the events in Iraq I have become increasingly politicised, although, contrary to mainstream media belief, this disillusionment with the current system was not solely down to the Iraq issue, but a broader discontent.

I have engaged in debates, forums, marches and pickets, mainly organised by the SWP (although am not a member!) around issues regarding war, racism, Palestine, etc. However, I note when reading their weekly Socialist Worker that their policy is for a revolutionary change, not through parliament, and I believe this to be the same of CPGB and many other organisations on the left.

I see no movement whatsoever towards this revolution at present - just meetings galore! I would embrace this ‘revolution’, but am realistic in my beliefs that the UK is far from this happening. This is why for now I support a democratic parliamentary movement.

Surely in light of the SA’s poor performances in elections we need a reform for the left. Where are the workers’ weapons for revolution? Nowhere! So show us the way forward for an elected leftwing alternative to capitalism and New Labour.

Meetings galore
Meetings galore

Tasmania

Speaking as someone who resigned from the Democratic Socialist Party, I found your article on the Socialist Alliance in Australia interesting (‘Shape of things to come’ Weekly Worker May 29).

But the comments on Tasmanian nationalism are a bit superfluous. What is the basis of a separate Tasmania? Unlike Scotland or Ireland, no separate culture, ethnicity or other elements that constitute nationhood exist.

Tasmania
Tasmania

Left values

Comrade Creswell’s letter was laughable and seems awfully familiar. The fact is that there are true comrades who believe in the cause, whether or not they belong to the working class. Just because they haven’t experienced life on a council estate doesn’t mean they can’t understand it.

I myself come from a working class background but now fall into the upper working class. This does not mean I cannot hold the values that the left holds dear. If you take up arms against non-working class comrades, I think you would kill off a big section of the left.

Left values
Left values

Middle class?

Comrade Mick Creswell is obviously frustrated by the failure of revolutionary ideas to seize the world by storm, but, then again, who isn’t (Letters, June 26)?

The comrade takes out his frustration on the left now, and states: “The problem with the left is that it is too middle class.” That there is a problem with the left I would not dispute, and would agree that it could be more effective. However, I cannot fathom how the comrade can come to the conclusion that it is “middle class”.

The whole thrust of his argument depends upon this middle class thing - but nowhere does he explicitly attempt to describe what this middle class creature is. The suggestion is that some leftwingers are not working class because they do not live on council estates, and no doubt do not eat pie and mash, beat each other up after football matches, wear cloth caps or keep ferrets.

It is a puerile kind of workerism that suggests that to be a culturally sophisticated, educated, ‘well paid’ member of society disqualifies you from membership of the working classes. This is nonsense based on the inverted snobbery of the comrade rather than an understanding of the nature of the working class in Britain.

There are a plethora of theories about social class - all of them loaded with political prejudice by the class that gave them birth. The predominant notion is of there being an upper, middle and lower class, related to the system of classification used by the government’s statistical office that divides us into As, Bs, C1s, C2s …

The distinction is made between skilled workers and unskilled workers, managers and supervisors, white and blue collar. It’s a theory of class that puts what a person does to the forefront, and probably comrade Cresswell would classify a university graduate such as myself as middle class. My education, it seems, gets me out of the working class.

My father was expelled from comprehensive school at the age of 15. He has no formal qualifications. Every morning, however, both my father and I are rudely awoken by alarm clocks to go and report to our respective employers and sell eight hours of our day, five days a week for a small sum of money that barely covers the costs of our continued existence in good health so that we can come back through necessity the next week and do it all over again.

To conclude that one’s social class changes just because of qualifications -either academic or vocational - is clearly illogical nonsense. To escape this, we will need a good bourgeois academic of our own: although Karl Marx is not the fount of eternal doctrinaire truth, he did make some social observations worth paying attention to.

In the Communist manifesto he and Engels proposed that society was divided into two main camps: the bourgeois and the proletarian. So the question then is, what is a proletarian? What distinguishes him/her from the bourgeois? The difference is not cultural - ie, it is not about the level of education, or type of housing. The difference is not in the type of work done - it’s not about nine to five in the office versus 10 till six on the warehouse nightshift.

The proletariat is as diverse as the demands of the system. The proletariat consists of doctors, lawyers , teachers and nuclear scientists, as much as road sweeps, policemen and fast-food workers. They are all paid a wage for their labour, and if they depend upon that wage, then they are proletarian; they are working class.

The bourgeois by contrast derive their income from the capital that they possess: with its power they exploit the proletarians in order to make more capital.

In the middle are the petty bourgeois: those with a small amount of capital who aspire to become fully bourgeois. This is the middle class and like the proletariat it is diverse - from bourgeois who have suffered financial losses and can no longer generate enough income from their investments to maintain themselves, to determined proletarians investing some of their wages in an attempt to leave the working class, and deriving an income partly from wages and capital.

The left is not too middle class, and his concept of the working class is counterproductive, workerist, and quite frankly silly inverted snobbery of a like I haven’t had a good laugh at since I last bought a copy of Class War.

Middle class?
Middle class?

Web hero

Phil Hamilton should get off the net and actually build a “serious working class organisation”. His vanity far surpasses the alleged vanity of the Committee for a Workers’ International’s website.

Phil has somehow propelled himself to celebrity ‘left’ status by virtue of never leaving the internet, co-running the UK Left Network and being allowed to spout pointless rubbish in the pages of the Weekly Worker, organ of the most “serious working class organisation” in the world ever, the mighty CPGB.

In his ‘review’ of the CWI website he writes: “… the vanity here is almost embarrassing, and sits uneasily with its self-promoted image as a serious working class organisation” (June 26). If Phil would like to go visit the CWI comrades in Kazakhstan or Kashmir and tell them they are not a “serious working class organisation”, I’d be more than happy to pay the cost of his airfare (one way).

I’m sure these comrades would be more than happy to meet Phil. Given his outstanding record of leading heroic workers’ struggles on the internet, they undoubtedly have much to learn from him.

Web hero
Web hero

Chutzpah

I don’t always agree with you, but I admire your chutzpah. The provision of objective information and an unvarnished reporting on the left in Britain is, dare I say it, revolutionary.

Long may the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg live on in the pages of the Weekly Worker!

Chutzpah
Chutzpah

Excellent

Thanks for another excellent Weekly Worker. I am finding the weekly features a refreshing and thought-provoking alternative to the usual nonsense written in most newspapers. The letters page is a definite strength, and often quite humorous.

I must agree strongly with Tony Green, who identifies individual action and choice as a way of practising “human liberation now” (Letters, June 26). As a teacher in south London, I am increasingly aware that many youngsters are falling prey to a trash capitalism of chauvinistic music ‘idols’, fast food and consumerism.

I can only agree with Jim Cullen of New York, who writes: “Polemics with other groups amount to no more than name calling”; and also with Mick Creswell, who argues that the left needs to work “within the class” rather than with the middle classes (Letters, June 26). The left needs to unite now to fight and destroy the twin evils of trash capitalism and the British National Party, who will otherwise provide the answers for the young, especially in our towns and cities.

The ideal starting point would be in the classroom, with teachers rejecting Blairite work demands to foster an awareness of ‘human liberation’ amongst their pupils.

Excellent
Excellent

AWL cultism

After reading Ian Donovan’s article, I immediately logged onto the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website, fully expecting to be shocked and outraged at the new depths of rightwing bigotry to which they’d slumped (‘Descent into cultism’, June 26).

Imagine my surprise when, reading through the back issues of Solidarity, I was unable to find many of the views which your correspondent had ascribed to the AWL. I searched in vain to find evidence of any dislike of Arab peoples, pro-Blair witch-hunting or collaboration with imperialism.

It took me only a few seconds to find ample evidence to refute Donovan’s claim that the “AWL has issued not one word of criticism or analysis of this ultra-reactionary phenomenon” in relation to the Israeli state’s persecution of Palestinians.

In fact there is a long debate between Donovan himself and some AWL comrades about the ‘right to return’, in which the only difference between himself and the AWL is that your correspondent agrees with the ‘right to return’ in principle only, since he concedes that it would be impossible for all Palestinians to exercise such a right.

Ian Donovan’s article then concludes with a whole series of analogies in which the AWL is compared variously with the British National Party, MI5, the Ku Klux Klan, the Workers Revolutionary Party and finally pro-Blair witch-hunters. Do you seriously agree that the AWL has anything in common with these organisations?

One has to wonder what your editorial team does all day to allow such a poor and factually flawed piece of writing through unnoticed. Was this just sloppy editing? If not then I suggest it is your organisation which is retreating into cultism rather than anyone else.

AWL cultism
AWL cultism

Moron

Four points in response to Ian Donovan’s latest ramblings.

The selection of words from Donovan’s articles printed in Solidarity were intended to illustrate two points: he is a little bit hysterical and a moron. His words aren’t worth analysing. People searching for the truth about what the AWL say about the Middle East and other issues can read what we say in our paper, pamphlets, magazines, website, etc.

Ian Donovan says I signed an article written by Sean Matgamna. As if. When I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists 20 years ago - when the world was just full of happy little people defending “actually existing socialism” - I used to be called “chairman” and “love” by members of the Militant Tendency. I suppose they thought no woman could be expected to referee a bunch of crap-headed, shite-talking (mostly) men, repeating the same shite back to each other, shouting things like “What did you call me?” and going on for hours. And if you complained? You’d be accused of not having a sense of humour.

For many years now - since primary school - I’ve been writing and signing my own articles. I’ve never put up with sexist crap.

Moron
Moron

No Bigot

Once again Ian Donovan serves up a mixture of lies and, well, more lies.

I am surprised to see myself described as the AWL’s “hanger-on” in Birmingham. I am not now, nor ever have been, a member of the AWL. If Ian bothered to get the facts, he would know that for six months or so I was on the local branch committee of the Birmingham Palestine Solidarity Campaign - hardly the action of an AWL supporter!

Where I do find agreement with the AWL is on their defence of the rights of children. It’s highly offensive and worrying that Ian Donovan dismisses my views against child abuse as a campaign to “censor” his daring opinions on “existing bourgeois norms on sexuality”.

On the contrary, it is these existing norms that are reflected in child abuse! Anyone who supports basic human rights, let alone who seeks to build a new society, should be repulsed by Ian’s views on this. For example he is on record (in the Weekly Worker) as describing the perpetrator of such abuse, Jonathan King, as the “victim”.

Again I call upon the CPGB to boot out any members with such grossly anti-human views on children. If that makes me a “bigot” then so be it. It would be a small price to pay to rid Ian and his disgusting views of a platform.

Perhaps if the left could take a basic human stand on issues such as paedophilia and child abuse rather than insinuating that people like me who do take such a stand are supporters of the British National Party, then you might actually get somewhere.

No Bigot
No Bigot

First Campism

Daniel Randall objects to my saying the AWL has no place on the political left and asks me to elaborate on why I call them “first campists” - that is, pro-imperialists (Letters, June 26).

With pleasure. The AWL has favoured Nato and US and British imperialism for a very long time, while trying to hide this a little through the time-honoured deployment of left-sounding phrases about class. This is reminiscent of the way the German SPD signed up to supporting imperialist war in 1914. You should read the statement where they justified that course of action. It was full of talk about internationalism and pre-war opposition to militarism, but that was just so much guff. The key part of the declaration was that the SPD said it could not leave the “fatherland” in the lurch. Hence it supported the war.

In the same way, the AWL throws up a smokescreen of concern for “working class politics”, while its main targets before and during the war on Iraq are the Socialist Workers Party, the Muslim Association of Britain and George Galloway. If the AWL is ‘leftwing’, judging from the targets that it chooses, it is a ‘left’ that The Daily Telegraph and the security services of imperialism can be quite comfortable with.

In a period in which US and British imperialism are quite unashamedly bent on ‘full-spectrum dominance’, ruthlessly invading countries and threatening to invade others; in a period where laws like the Terrorism Act 2000 are more and more being used to criminalise domestic dissent and exile communities, the AWL’s half-baked updating of Max ‘Bomb Hanoi’ Shachtman deserves to be branded with infamy, if not with a bullet.

First Campism
First Campism