Letters

Brilliant

John Hutnyk is, as always, straight up and clear in his brilliant article (‘Razor-wire imperialism’, July 17).

He analyses detention in order to do his ‘reality check-up’, reminding us that we should not forget that we have the right and obligation to do ours, calling us to see how behind all this razor-wire ‘our’ western democracy is gradually being transformed into protectionism, fundamentalism and the abuse of human rights.

Brilliant
Brilliant

No spent force

As a member of the Socialist Party in Ireland, I find your publication quite amusing. I suppose it is almost flattering that you devote such a large section of your website to our organisation.

However, much to your consternation, I’m sure rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. In the last year or so, new branches have been established in many parts of the country. In fact we have active branches in areas where we have had nothing since the days of Militant.

Despite the poisonous sectarianism of some elements of the so-called left in Ireland, we are the only leftwing organisation with a credible base in the working class. In next year’s local elections we are running more candidates than ever before and can reasonably expect to increase our number of council positions. Our youth section has also experienced a successful growth since its establishment two years ago.

There is a lot of hard work ahead for the Socialist Party, but we are now a vibrant organisation with a healthy balance of youth and experience and are far from being a spent force.

No spent force
No spent force

Quotas work

According to your article, ‘Going Dutch or double Dutch?’, you cannot win equality through quotas (Weekly Worker July 17). Surely the recent experience of the Scottish Socialist Party is that quotas for women can work where there is a will to make them work. We now have four out of six women among the SSP MSPs, and 10 out of 22 women on the SSP executive.

Quotas work
Quotas work

China greetings

I am a PhD student at the institute of Marxism at Renmin University of China in Beijing. We stand firmly with you. Do your best to struggle for a better world.

China greetings
China greetings

SWP in Asia

Good luck, comrade Steve Godward, and all the best. To you and the comrades of the Weekly Worker, keep up the good work - we reproduce a few of your articles. We too are appalled by the attacks against your comrades at Marxism 2003.

We are used to the pathetic behaviour of the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency. They claim Malay and Indonesian sections, but in truth they have nothing. Callinicos is an object of pure ridicule in Asia. In point of fact, he was told to get lost by a serious bunch in the PSM, one of the Marxist organisations in Malaysia.

In Hong Kong, they have three ‘members’ after seven years of trying to work here. Their history:

First, they sold out the vitally important ISS cleaners’ strike - the organiser left to work full-time in Greenpeace in shame - he mistook a legal contract for the necessity to close down a strike that was escalating. They do not conduct industrial work now.

Secondly, they set up a broad alliance with christians in the anti-war coalition. Thirdly they are members of the 30-body member coalition against Tung - calling for direct elections in three years! Meanwhile they call for entry into the Tung administration!

Fourthly, they have blacklisted all Marxists that raise opposition to their tactics. They have orchestrated smear campaigns ad nauseum.

They ingratiate themselves into NGOs - in fact they are all employed in NGOs!

They have the money to do small things and the positions - unelected and not won through consistency and work, etc - but employed by the tools of imperialism.

They will never even dare raise the question of thuggery with us, as we work with the lumpenproletariat closely; in fact they are somewhat concerned for their own well-being.

We have half a mind to let the dogs of the lumpens on them if they continue their attacks on good comrades in the west. We do, however, ensure that we take up arguments politically instead, but it is so tempting. After all, this is China, where politics is sometimes conducted by the baseball bat.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is they are a bunch of toothless wonders, incapable of creation and development, but proven at destruction - sectarian indeed. Basically they are scum - save for one important area, Thailand, where the Thai lot maintain a healthy distance from London.

All in all, the SWP are a bunch of useless fuckers. For an organisation that claims to lead the world revolution, they have nothing.

SWP in Asia
SWP in Asia

Sloppy

If you ever pay attention to them, bourgeois journalists can be an entertaining lot.

For instance, the Weekly Worker should be gratified that it is often cited as a source of information and well-targeted criticism of the left. It’s just such a shame that some hacks can’t actually seem to even accurately crib what the Weekly Worker lays out for them.

Take Tribune - a paper staffed with its fair share of aspiring ‘bourgeois’ journalists, actually. In its coverage of the correspondence between a leading member of the SWP and the SA executive (Weekly Worker July 3), this august journal manages to make some laughably elementary errors.

It refers to Stuart Richardson, treasurer of Erdington Socialist Alliance, as “Stuart Erdington”. Salma Yaqoob is dubbed a “committee member of the Socialist Alliance” - she is in fact the chair of Birmingham Stop the War Coalition, and not even an SA member. The article refers to “correspondence” between this shadowy “Stuart Erdington” and John Rees - the Weekly Worker made clear that comrade Rees was answering queries from the Birmingham SA committee and Stuart had penned a personal response, handed out at the local SA’s AGM.

Of course, comrade Rees gleefully corrected these errors in the following issue of Tribune, but did not deny the veracity of the original report in the Weekly Worker - that there was a proposal to support Yaqoob in the Euro elections “on a limited programme - limited in its commitment to women’s rights and there would be no mention of gay rights”.

In contrast to the generally scrupulous Weekly Worker writers, the Tribune journalist showed a sloppy disregard for facts that obscures the core of the argument. Perhaps they should be offered a job on Socialist Worker?

Sloppy
Sloppy

1917 fantasists

Bob Harding was quite correct in pinpointing democratic centralism as the primary mechanism of control that the leaders of Leninist parties use to police their members and, potentially, the working class (Letters, July 10).

It is noteworthy that in the Weekly Worker’s recent report of the Socialist Alliance conference you were rightly critical of the Socialist Workers Party’s manipulation of the slate system in order to ensure its domination of the new executive.

Yet you do not make a single criticism of the slate system itself. To do so would be to undermine the very system which the CPGB practises as a matter of high principle.

In reality, the slate system and its theoretical justification of democratic centralism is all about wheeler-dealing, back-door manipulation and demonstrations of loyalty to the leading group and its ‘correct’ political line.

Can it really be an accident that every democratic centralist party in history, from the mass (ie, Soviet, Chinese, etc) to our relatively lowly sects in Britain, has ended up as a bureaucratic nightmare? But of course every sect accuses every other of bureaucratism, whilst claiming that it itself is the exception. I suppose that is what is called Marxist science!

It is also interesting that in CPGB and ex-Socialist Labour Party member John Pearson’s proposals for democratising the Socialist Alliance, he omits to mention the one measure which would do most to undermine the power of the would-be Lenins within the alliance: ie, a secret ballot for all elections at every level of the organisation (Weekly Worker July 3).

Does the CPGB oppose this because it would mean that the leadership would not then be able to ensure that their own members had voted the ‘right’ way? I think we should be told.

Socialists will never gain enough support to mount a serious challenge to the capitalist system whilst we behave in a less democratic fashion than the main capitalist parties.

All of our actions, as well as our words, should be about demonstrating that a more open, more humane, more free way of relating to one another is possible.

We should be the new society in embryonic form in the here and now. Utopian? Probably. Necessary? Certainly. Whilst the Socialist Alliance remains merely an arena of factional struggle between the various 1917 fantasists, then it will remain at the margins of society - on the same level as fascists and religious cults and I, along with the vast majority of the working class, will not be joining.

1917 fantasists
1917 fantasists

Prima donnas

At the cost of stating the obvious, it sounds like the CPGB were just plain beat by your inability to actually mobilise any votes in Birmingham SA.

Now I may be wrong, but when I used to stand in elections in my union, in community groups or in political organisations, I always use to canvass like mad, lobby hard for votes, get as many of my supporters as possible to meetings - that sort of thing: basic political stuff.

It seems you didn’t and your laziness or lack of appeal even to other activists brought you down. Shame - learn and win next time. The SWP haven’t exactly got mass appeal.

History has shown they can’t even keep themselves together, let alone any form of alliance. I am surprised that instead of actually doing the hard work of organising within the Socialist Alliance the response is to walk out the door into an even smaller, ‘independent’ SA.

Now the SWP have really won, who needs purges when you have prima donnas?

Prima donnas
Prima donnas

False conception

The SWP represents a continuity: Gerry Healy, who is detested by the SWP, functioned similarly. The issue is not ‘bad’, power-mad people, but a false conception of the revolutionary party - the SWP and Healy had a mechanical conception: an army led by the generals of the central committee.

I believe we need to struggle to reject all forms of elitist conceptions of the party. Rather I suggest the party that is needed is the community of revolutionaries which is preparing the new man and woman capable of a socialist society before there can be a revolution.

False conception
False conception

Lessons of history

Whilst correctly taking the SWP to task, following unpleasant reports concerning their members’ attempted physical assault on Weekly Worker sellers at this year’s Marxism event, it is unfortunate that Jack Conrad went on to display a decidedly faulty grasp of history (‘Party notes’ Weekly Worker July 17).

Indeed, in getting no further than those (curiously unnamed) whom he cites as having offered mostly unsatisfactory explanations for the SWP’s lack of democracy and having failed to raise the call for a labour movement inquiry into the unacceptable business of violence against rival leftists, comrade Conrad turns his ire on Leon Trotsky’s “so-called Fourth International” and one of its former US leaders, James P Cannon.

The latter is accused of “boot[ing] out Max Shachtman, Hal Draper and co [from the US affiliate to the old FI, the American Socialist Workers Party - no relation], simply because they disagreed with the woefully mistaken view of Stalin’s USSR as a ‘degenerate [sic] workers’ state’”.

If comrade Conrad bothered to check out what really happened (perhaps best documented in a volume called In Defence of Marxism - Pathfinder Press, 1973), he would find that Shachtman and co voluntarily split from the then US SWP, as they disagreed with the majority view that the USSR was in fact a degenerated (ie, once healthy) workers’ state and should be defended against imperialist aggression. And Trotsky and Cannon actually argued for Shachtman, Martin Abern, James Burnham and other oppositionists to stay within the party in 1940 and argue their differences out internally with proper minority rights.

Given his unenlightened remarks, Conrad might also care to explain when he believes the former Soviet Union ceased being a workers’ state, degenerated or otherwise.

My understanding is that the early 1990s is the period when the bureaucratic, post-capitalist structures finally collapsed under the inevitable pressures of their own conservatism and inertia and a little help from the greedy imperialists. However, comrade Conrad talks as though October 1917 were just a bit of reformism!

The above recommended documents contain, amongst other things, articles and letters on how the revolutionary internationalists of the 1940s actively fought for real socialist principles and a genuine proletarian morality and against the debilitating pressures and influences of bourgeois public opinion and adaptation to opportunist positions.

It is highly doubtful that such documents can ever have been read by the Chris Bamberys and John Reeses of this world, judging by the modern British SWP’s current trajectory and overall political history!

And what a great pity it is that the same SWP cannot enthuse its members with a similar sort of aggression to that apparently shown to CPGB supporters at Marxism when it comes to serious mobilisations (as opposed to Anti-Nazi League lollipop-waving) to confront the arrogant bands of fascists we are seeing on the streets!

Those who do not learn the lessons of history ...

Lessons of history
Lessons of history

Staying in

The majority of the members of Stockport Socialist Alliance - certainly all of the active members - agree with those comrades who believe that the current political tactic should be to stay in the SA and fight the bureaucratic centralism of the SWP.

At our recent meeting it was unanimously agreed that it was not acceptable for the editor of the local SA newsletter, Left Turn, to present the strategy of SWP leaders, primarily John Rees, for a peace and justice party as a non-political question of simply getting stuck into more activity.

In violation of elementary workers’ democracy, John Rees has refused to provide details of the proposed electoral alliance or the negotiations with the leaders of the mosque in Birmingham. He treats the SA as his own private property rather than the collective property of the membership.

We have the right to participate in the formulation of policy, strategy and tactics. We object to the attempt to impose a new turn or line on us without debate and discussion. The suggestion of a Peace and Justice party should be presented to the membership for acceptance or agreement. Left Turn should open its pages to the debate on this issue.

SA activists in Stockport are totally opposed to any watering down of a socialist programme or any refusal to fight for the democratic rights of gays or women in any opportunist attempt to form a popular front with islamic clerics.

The Stockport branch was formed after the Manchester SWP decided to break up the large South Manchester branch because the local SWP chief had lost a few votes.

Political culture was dismissed, in a philistine way, as equivalent to discussing the inside of a cat’s arse, which no worker was interested in. The justification of the break-up of South Manchester was ‘weapons of mass membership’. The SWP had found evidence of a mass of new members who actively needed to join a new branch, if not in 45 minutes, then very soon.

After the polemical war, or personal abuse, from local SWP leaders, no mass of new members was discovered. The new branches simply shadowed the branches of the SWP.

A comrade, now a committee member in the branch, who had stood as an electoral candidate on two occasions for the Socialist Alliance, was not invited or informed of meetings of her new local branch. Her political crime? Voting with the comrades who opposed the line of treating the anti-war movement as simply numbers to be mobilised rather than discussing how socialists could influence the politics and direction of the movement as well.

Unlike the leaders of the SWP, the majority of the Stockport branch of the SA do not treat the self-activity of the class and socialism from below as a mere shibboleth.

Staying in
Staying in

Walking out

At a meeting of about 15 members of Brighton and Hove Socialist Alliance, myself and Brian Avey, a shop steward on the buses, presented our motion condemning the Socialist Workers Party for their outrageous behaviour in Birmingham SA and demanding that that AGM be rerun and Steve Godward be reinstated as vice-chair of the SA nationally.

The motion was defeated by nine to four, though it wasn’t due to SWP packing so much as the International Socialist Group taking fright at the prospect of winning.

Another motion, which was presented by two ISG members (the SWP took a back seat and had only three members present, one of whom was wringing his hands!), repeated all the old canards of the SWP.

What happened in Birmingham was democratic, because everyone’s membership had been approved by the executive members present (no surprise!). They adopted the SWP line that no one has a life tenancy on positions in the SA (as if this was an issue).

The motion deliberately distorted our opposition to links with religious organisations and their leaders and turned this into hostility to muslims instead, stating that “singling out the beliefs of muslims for special criticism can only bolster the reactionary agenda of the warmongers and racists, and should be rejected by all socialists”. Well, yes, but we are not attacking the beliefs of muslims any more than we attack the beliefs of any religion (which I hope we do!).

The only nod in our direction was a lukewarm acceptance that “in this context the premeditated packing of SA meetings with members of affiliated organisations who had not previously been members of the SA damages the spirit in which the SA was set up and fosters an atmosphere of anger and frustration”.

This was about as far as the ISG’s lapdogs were prepared to go in criticising the behaviour of the SWP. They went along with another lie - viz, that Steve Godward and the Birmingham comrades had opposed the ‘unity’ motion at the national conference, when of course what they had opposed was the interpretation of that motion.

The meeting was deeply unhappy at what had happened. About three people abstained, including the ISG chair. The ISG wriggled with embarrassment about the fact that gay and women rights have been dumped by the SWP in their electoral pacts with the mosque. Andy Richards, the seconder, loudly proclaimed that he would not accept the removal of support for gays and women from any manifesto, but nonetheless supported the SWP who are doing precisely that.

But then Andy, only a couple of weeks before, had expressed to both myself and Brian his unhappiness at what the SWP had done. Yet at the meeting he seconded a motion which had been virtually written by the SWP (it was almost identical to the one they moved at the national council).

I am reminded of the old Roman saying that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad. What has happened in the Socialist Alliance is extremely sad.

Despite their protestations, the SWP has deliberately torn up any vestige of democracy in the SA, removing anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest. Our task is to regroup with those who are not disillusioned, in order that in England - just as in Wales, it would appear, and Scotland - a workers’ party can be built.

When the vote came, both Brian and myself, and Dave Newland, one of the three SA candidates in the last elections and a former Labour councillor, resigned and walked out.

Walking out
Walking out