Letters

Loach award

When awarded a prize, one must check who is giving it, what is their background, and whose money is behind it.

On July 4 the mass media announced that five artists have been selected for the Praemium Imperiale global arts prize, awarded by the Japan Arts Council - including filmmaker Ken Loach. This prize is awarded by the most rightwing people in Japan. It is supported by the Sankei daily paper, which is the most militaristic of the mass media. Yasuhiro Nakasone, almost the highest ranking of the Japanese right wing, is among the judges - the only Japanese - for this prize.

Will Ken Loach receive this prize with his head bowed? That would be totally indecent. I hope Loach supporters in Britain and in the world will not celebrate this tainted award. Please inform Loach’s office about the background of this prize!

Loach award
Loach award

Galloway

George Galloway is the epitome of the kind of ‘representative’ who has bled the workers dry in the name of socialism (‘Defend Galloway’ Weekly Worker July 3).

He is up to his armpits in supporting personally madman Saddam, describing him as “indefatigable”, although he is not, in common with most of the anti-war brigade, in danger from the Iraqi secret service, Republican Guard or the private security thugs of Uday and Qusay.

You, along with all socialists and communists, should want to crawl away and hide after supporting a ‘man of the workers’ whose idea of paradise is a modern-day version of Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.

Finally Galloway is elected to represent his constituents - not to piss about with Tariq Aziz in the lap of luxury whilst the Iraqi masses starved and died in a set of circumstances brought about by Saddam.

Galloway
Galloway

Distortions

Having read Phil Hamilton’s column, I checked out the Committee for a Workers’ International website ready for embarrassing vanity, but I still do not know what the hell Phil Hamilton was talking about (‘Virtual vanity’, June 26).

From previous issues of the Weekly Worker I thought the line was that the CWI had given in to nationalism in Scotland. Now I find it avoids “national-democratic issues”. Then I checked out the CWI’s piece on Marxism and Ireland. To dismiss this as “essentially calls on Northern Ireland workers to bury their differences around economic struggles” is as about as fair as saying that the CPGB wants them to shoot the shit out of each other over national struggles.

Why bother to review websites if you are just going to distort them?

Distortions
Distortions

Leftist stalking

Despite my writing “pointless rubbish”, Phillip Alan feels moved enough to pen a silly defence of the CWI website (Letters, July 3).

Actually, instead of criticising my review of his sect’s online vanity, he chooses to latch onto one throwaway remark concerning the Socialist Party’s prolier-than-thou sectarianism. If proof is needed of this self-promoted image, I suggest the comrade looks over the contributions CWI members have made to various discussion lists over the years. It is not uncommon to find posts boasting about x amount of SP councillors, y amount of leading union activists, the glory days of Liverpool city council and the Anti-Poll Tax Federation. This being the case, comrade Alan really needs to ask himself why the SP feels the need to play these cards to the point of absurdity, if indeed it is a serious working class organisation.

I was also tickled by my attributed “celebrity-left” status. You’d really have to inhabit a rarefied world characterised by a constant preoccupation with a small number of leftist e-lists to believe that I’m some sort of ‘star’.

Despite having never met me in real life or online, Phillip nevertheless thinks he knows everything there is to know about my offline activities. I can only conclude that I’ve attracted one of the unwanted trappings of fame: my very own celebrity stalker.

Leftist stalking
Leftist stalking

Sectarianism

Coming from (though not currently resident in) Scotland, I can testify that religious sectarianism is alive and well north of the border (‘Anti-working class cancer’, July 3).

At the end of the 1970s, coming home from school one day, I saw a loudspeaker van parked outside my local catholic church. It was playing a tape of one of the speeches of the reverend Ian Paisley. I suppose you could call it an attempted provocation.

In 2001, a few hundred yards along the very same road, I was walking past when a bus full of Orange Lodgers with musical instruments stopped for a break and its occupants got out (it was a summer day not long before July 12). One of them saw me and threatened me, though I had said not a word to them. My crime? I was wearing a dark green T-shirt, clearly not the sash their fathers wore.

My perception is that the Scottish Socialist Party has sidestepped the issue for tactical reasons. But in Scotland, whether you are by origin protestant or catholic still matters in a way it does not in England, though I believe a similar situation used to exist in Liverpool and some other places. It is certainly a circumstance that makes Scotland different from England, though not more progressive.

Sectarianism
Sectarianism

Party v workers

Tony Green argues that many sects “offer alternative systems of control of those currently practised by the ruling world capitalist elite” (Letters, June 26). The points he makes are given weight by the very idea and practice of ‘democratic centralism’.

This concept explains what I mean by ‘sect’ and is a process of substituting working class debate and democracy with dominance by a ‘party’. If there is a positive, healthy side to ideas like ‘vanguard’ and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, it is precisely as a working class weapon against substitutionist party dominance.

The Russian Revolution was sabotaged by a party that lifted ‘All power to the soviets’ from other groups, only to crush future demonstrations advocating returning to the slogan. Today sects snidely get together before public meetings trying to skewer democratic decision-making. Their members are expected to support the sect, irrespective of working class interests coming from open, honest debate with party and non-party workers. The CPGB has even defended the practice of sects’ organised heckling to stifle free, ongoing debate, under the misconception that it is thus furthering robust, proletarian debate!

Democratic centralism is based on an attitude of snide rather than intellectual misunderstanding. The CPGB have revealed they really do understand the dodgy practice of segregating concepts which are actually related in life: eg, ‘political support’ and ‘military support’. Yet no consideration is encouraged of how ‘activity’ is somehow so different from ‘communication’.

The CPGB booklet Problems of communist organisation reveals how ‘centralism’ is a practice that puts some restrictions on ‘democracy’. For developing the self-liberation of the working class for themselves and by themselves this is not good. Lenin overruled democratic centralism when it came to the crunch in a revolutionary situation. Today, if the Socialist Alliance had a ‘partyist’ democratic vote (against working class interests) to support the British pound, the CPGB would go along with making a statement of voting with patriotism. However, when a democratic ‘partyist’ decision went against the CPGB’s sect interest (deciding not to have an SA paper) you just try to go ahead with that action anyway.

The whole point of influence and organising should be for any group to further working class freedom and power and not use underhand ways to increase party dominance over workers, as well as restricting the free-thinking process among party members.

Party v workers
Party v workers

Petty theory

What on earth is going on? What are all the divisions for? I thought we were all Marxists - we should be liberating the proletariat from bourgeois alienation, not arguing about how we apply it. Whilst we focus on petty issues of theory, we forget about important issues of action; nothing is being done to win the hearts and mind of the proletariat because the socialist and communist parties are too busy arguing with each other.

What do I see in my newsletter from the CPGB? Not ‘Socialism marches forward’, but ‘Crisis for Socialist Alliance’. Marx did not say, ‘Working men of all countries, stay oppressed, because your socialist leaders should argue about what constitutes Marxism and how our parties should be separate.’ No wonder the bourgeoisie thinks socialism is dead.

Socialist and communist parties, hear me - wake up! Rather then focusing on what ideological aspects differ between us, we need to focus on what ideological aspects unite us all! We will be stamped out by the bourgeoisie unless we unite. We should not look around for enemies. We should look around for comrades for the final endgame struggle.

Petty theory
Petty theory

Racist state

Outside this year’s Marxism - annual education event of the SWP - I was told by a member of the Spartacist League that the black bourgeoisie in South Africa is “racist” against the black working class, and the South African state, now run by the African National Congress, is just as racist as it was under apartheid.

Of course, this is nothing more that an exquisitely stupid expression of an article of faith of much of the left - that a capitalist state is by definition “racist”, as is the ruling class whose interests it serves.

I was just wondering if any reader could top this as ‘idiotic quote of the month’? Perhaps the Weekly Worker could give prizes?

Racist state
Racist state

Not changed

Picking up last week’s Weekly Worker, it was refreshing to see that some of the things on the left never change. I was highly amused to see Cathy Nugent make reference to her terrible days in York Labour Party Young Socialists all those years ago.

I vaguely remember Nugent’s activities in York. Frankly she was widely regarded as a slightly dishonest sectarian, with a habit of wagging her finger in her opponent’s face, and it’s heartening to see she hasn’t changed in nearly two decades.

Hardly world-changing events, but Nugent was elected chair of her YS branch because at that time it was dominated by supporters of Socialist Organiser - which would of course explain how she achieved that position in the first place. She was of course right, in so far as her colleagues at the time certainly did enjoy spending hours “shite-talking”, which was why she then or now never managed to be part of an organisation capable of growing.

I’m sure Ian Donovan was devastated by her ever so political name-calling. Try growing up, Nugent. Twenty years down the line one would have thought you would have evolved a little bit, but, still being in the same sect all these years, I guess that’s too much to hope for.

Not changed
Not changed

Middle class

I thank comrades Clarke and Campy for their replies (Letters, July 3), but they reveal the crisis of class identity within the revolutionary movement.

Comrade Clarke says: “The left is not too middle class”, whilst comrade Campy concludes that marginalising “non-working class comrades ... would kill off a big section of the left”. It is telling that both comrades dismiss and laugh off as infantile any criticism of class composition, and the effect it has on our ability to win over the working class to our ideas.

There is a vast difference between understanding “left values” and being able to communicate and relate them to the class. I use my council estate analogy to demonstrate how passive, middle class sensibilities are reflected in much of the left. I did not make the point that “one’s social class changes just because of qualifications”, but that recruiting from predominantly middle class universities seems more comfortable to many on the left than activity in working class communities.

As comrade Dave Martin wrote last week, there are endless “debates, forums, marches and pickets” aimed mainly at recruiting people to different sects and selling their respective papers. What is achieved by this? The same old faces come along for a pep talk, to hear the same arguments about why the war was a bad thing; or another march where 12 papers were sold; or we’ve gone along and shouted at the slowly increasing number of fascists sitting on our town councils. Middle class activists flex the managerial and academic tendencies their class are disposed to, but they do not equip the class to confidently stand up and fight for itself.

I remember Joe Ashton and Dennis Skinner formed a short-lived parliamentary group for the few working class MPs left in parliament at the time. It soon attracted professionals and well-off Tories who insisted that because their dads made them ride the shop bike when they were lads, they must be working class and could identify with us.

That’s a lot like the revolutionary movement today - the self-proclaimed ‘vanguard’ consisting of people from relatively privileged backgrounds, whose anger, or more precisely sympathy, is a result of rebelling against ‘mummy and daddy’, rather than the injustice inflicted on the class.

Instead of justifying this with a straitjacketed interpretation of Marxism, let’s be realistic. The sad truth is the left is being influenced more by the upturn in Middle England radicalism than working class militancy. This surely creates a detrimental conflict of class interests and perspectives.

Class does have a cultural dimension, and it can’t just be assumed to satisfy personal rebelliousness. A conscious working class is unlikely to see a mirror of itself in the left, but an alien entity autonomous of it. There can be little doubt that we are seeing the gentrification of the revolutionary working class movement, particularly at the top, meaning the revolutionary left will become more detached and irrelevant to the class, and more inclined towards like-minded movements of assorted, well-meaning liberals.

But, as the ex-Tory MP Matthew Paris put it, “The middle classes ruin everything”. It’s time we realised that, and organised ourselves, rather than be managed by the managing classes.

Middle class
Middle class

Stalinist banditry

Marcus Ström’s article on relations between the Socialist Workers Party and the Stalinists is worth a comment (Weekly Worker June 26). It is not an accident that the central committee of the SWP have approached the Communist Party of Britain for joint work. It is where they have been going politically for some time.

In recent years the SWP have become closer to the CPB than any other left organisation, both in methods of work and how they view the world. The Stalinists retreated from the idea that the working class was the central agency for change decades ago. In its place they created a world view that divided it into good camps and bad camps and good nations and bad nations instead of classes.

Today the SWP demonises the United States and Israel to the point of picketing Jewish-owned shops and not recognising the latter in spite of Israel having one of the biggest solidarity movements in the world. The Stalinists also had a much distorted means-justify-ends view about legitimate methods within the labour movement. The end of organisational advantage justified all sorts of opportunistic, undemocratic, dishonest, sectarian methods.

Today the SWP attempts expulsions of Socialist Alliance members who do not conform to their methods and politics and pack out AGMs with sympathisers new to politics to take control: eg, Birmingham SA. It is a form of banditry that is part of a Stalinist tradition and not an anti-Stalinist one.

It was the Stalinists, as the SWP know full well, who built cross-class popular fronts, with such disastrous consequences for the working class and humanity, in the 1930s. The modern-day form consists of alliances with fundamentalists, nationalists and liberals organised by the SWP within the Stop the War Coalition. And they hate nobody more than those within the anti-Stalinist left who remind them of where these methods and flawed tactics lead.

Flawed politics, tactics and methods have theoretical roots. In part it can be seen in the work of leading SWP theorist Alex Callinicos. In a half-hour lead-off on his latest work (An anti-capitalist manifesto) recently in Edinburgh, neither socialism nor the working class were mentioned once. On being challenged about this, he argued that the working class were only one source of change, but there were other important elements. It represented a return to pre-Marxian utopian socialism.

This retreat from class has been combined with a continuation of the Cliffite dogma that ‘tactics contradict principles’. While most of the rest of the left believe in being firm in principle and flexible in tactics, Cliff stood this on its head. The damage this legacy is doing can be seen most starkly in the demise of the Socialist Alliance and the rise of the British National Party.

The Socialist Alliance has to develop into an organisation which campaigns on all the issues that are important to workers on a week-to-week basis over the next four years under its own banner. It needs to be identified clearly with resistance to this government. It should also initiate and support broad-based, non-sectarian, democratic, single-issue campaigns that are in the interests of the working class and measure success by how much change takes place on the given issue in our class’s interests.

Have we repealed the anti-union laws, stopped wars, reversed asylum legislation, unionised sweatshops, etc as a result of our campaigning? Recruitment should be seen as a secondary goal. Ironically success on any of these issues would see much greater recruitment to the left. Greater left unity in England and Wales would also help undermine the increasing nationalism within the Scottish Socialist Party.

Someone on the SWP central committee really ought to make a Khrushchev-style speech about the Cliff era and its legacy. While it would not save the SWP from sharing the same fate as the old Soviet Union, it certainly would make the left a far more productive, less frustrating place to be. The question is: has anyone got the guts?

Stalinist banditry
Stalinist banditry