Letters

Age of consent

While I’m totally in agreement with your call for the abolition of all age-of-consent laws, I’m quite disturbed by your statement, “Society has an obligation to protect those people whose level of emotional comprehension impedes their ability to understand the meaning and consequences of sexual activity from being exploited by those whose own dysfunctional sexuality drives them to seek gratification without obtaining meaningful consent” (‘Effective consent or moralism’, December 19 2002).

Please tell me what you mean by “meaning and consequences of sexual activity”. This line exactly parrots the bigoted arguments of those who are opposed to the abolition of such laws, for it implies that there’s something inherently dangerous and disgusting about sexual activity. Does a child need to be briefed on the meaning and consequences of getting a haircut?

“Effective consent” is really nothing more than a mutual awareness of what is transpiring, without either party indicating that he or she wishes to stop.

Age of consent
Age of consent

Anarchist approach

I have been reading the Weekly Worker with interest over the last three weeks. While admiring your honesty in reporting on what appears to be a fundamental crisis in the revolutionary socialist left in Britain, as an anarchist I can’t say I’m surprised by what is going on.

While you are right to highlight the short-sightedness and contradiction in the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘peace and justice’ policy, any approach rooted in electioneerism is doomed to failure. You also fail to put this crisis in a wider context of growing direct action and community-based resistance to capitalism. Revolutionary elements in the anti-capitalist movement, while not all anarchists by a long way, have little interest in joining parties.

Few buy into classical Marxism. Working class people do not vote because they know it does not matter who they vote for. Thinking that elected leftwing general secretaries will change anything is a joke. It is about time the left realised that traditional approaches to change have failed. There is a lot going on: from squats to animal liberation, to prisoner support and industrial sabotage. Why waste time with elections in any shape or form? Maybe, as Bakunin observed, what Marxists really want is power, not change.

Anarchist approach
Anarchist approach

Oust FBU leaders

‘A drawn out defeat’ was a good article, but missing certain elements: ie, the conduct and the lies spun to members in order for the final, final, final offer to be accepted, and also the way the voting was carried out (Weekly Worker July 24).

On such an important issue at least a postal ballot should have been the way: this would have given militants more possibility of swaying the weak and expose the lies being spun by the executive council and officials in certain brigades. For example, the representative of the West Midlands lied on the rostrum, stating the offer was the accumulation of 150 branch meetings.

The members were up for it, not weak, as stated by the EC. The future of the Fire Brigades Union is dependent on the removal of the leadership. That is the only way we will get the membership back who have left.

Oust FBU leaders
Oust FBU leaders

Reactionary utopia

The origins of ideas and policies within any organisation are very important. Sometimes policies have to change as a result of changes in conditions or simply thinking through more deeply what one has said on a given issue.

However, a section of the far left have also engaged in the dishonest practice of changing lines as a result of the perceived needs of the group by its leaders, while presenting a changing world as the real reason for the shift. I think the “independent socialist Scotland” line of the Scottish Socialist Party is a classic example.

But one should not be ahistorical. What was the background to the adoption of independence? Devolution was a product of a series of labour movement defeats in the 80s and 90s at the hands of the Tories. Huge industrial defeats in the 80s and political defeats at the 1983, 1987 and 1992 general elections created a desire amongst soft-left Labour politicians in Scotland and the old right around Dewar for devolved power. Their motivations were different. With Scottish Labour Action it was about career-hungry politicians’ frustration at Scotland always voting Labour and getting the Tories. With the old right it was more about preventing independence by implementing halfway-house constitutional change. The far left, with different degrees of emphasis at that time, saw it rightly as a diversion from class-struggle politics and the necessity for the labour movement to be democratised.

The consequence of a halfway-house-type settlement was a parliament that created an inbuilt conflict between London and Edinburgh over decision-making. It guaranteed that there would be an increasing demand for more power in Scotland. In other words the form the devolutionary settlement took had a nationalist and separatist outcome and trap built into it.

The origins of the independence line within the SSP are tied up with the Militant Tendency’s own history as a group. The 1992 ‘Scottish turn’ was really about comrades in what was then Scottish Militant Labour establishing more control and autonomy over decisions than what general secretary Peter Taaffe wanted to allow. Independence became the ideological scaffolding around an organisational split which had little to do with events in the real world. It served the purpose of demarcating the Scottish comrades from what became Taaffe’s Socialist Party in England and Wales and allowed Alan McCombes to take the majority of the SML membership with him. In other words it was a functional line, much like the state capitalism position had been for Cliff within the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party.

The consequences of this functional line have been pretty awful so far and are potentially disastrous for the SSP and the working class. Socialists and trade unionists within the labour movement who have understood the difficulties workers underwent to establish trade unions and extend them throughout the island as a whole, have been deterred from joining the SSP even though it is the SSP they agree with on a whole raft of other issues. They understand breaking up the labour and trade union movement along national lines is no substitute for the democratisation and transformation of that movement - and comrades from the International Socialist Movement (former SML majority) would have agreed with this not so long ago.

SSP members who would like to be enthusiastic builders of the party find it difficult with such a wrong policy at the core of the programme. And one cannot help feeling that the turning of this policy into a shibboleth (that word again) is part of a deliberate policy by the ISM-dominated leadership of ostracising and marginalising the internationalists (dissidents, as they see it) within the party. Previously it was the Stalinised communist parties that used policies to test loyalty and crush dissent.

It has also, tragically, made nationalists out of internationalists, even though that is genuinely not the self-perception of the individuals concerned. To dismiss Marxist accounts of Scottish history as “Brit left” or “British empire history” is reminiscent of the methodology of Stalinist-type amalgams. Either accept Scottish nationalist histories of Scotland or accept British nationalist histories - you must be in one camp or the other. What rubbish!

Neither is there any difference really between the “independent socialist Scotland” line and the disastrous ‘theory’ of socialism in one country. Both are predicated on one country being able to survive in a hostile world because of the great natural resources it has within its borders (see Imagine, written by Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan [review]). Both positions tried to obtain support by keying into a psychology that one particular national group can go it alone. We don’t have to wait for conditions to be ripe for revolution in every other country. We Scots have enough fish, coal, oil, etc to survive.

In a world dominated by finance capital and multinational companies this is a reactionary utopian absurdity and the wrong message to send to workers. In the process the centrality of the international working class as the agency for international change is lost. As is the necessity for workers to plan in association with each other across artificially created national borders.

Trotsky talked about a democratic federal republic of Europe. The first four congresses of the Third International talked about workers’ governments and workers’ self-management of industry. These are the kind of policies and slogans that should be at the heart of our programme. A nationalist-reformist programme will fail in the long run, whatever short-term gains are made.

Reactionary utopia
Reactionary utopia

AWL and Zionism

Tony Greenstein’s article is right about one thing: the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s position on Zionism and Israel is not the result of “confusion”, but the result of a long and often heated debate that took place within the AWL’s predecessor organisation in the 1980s (‘AWL and roots of Zionism’, July 24).

It was a debate that took place largely in public (ie, letters were exchanged in our paper at the time), and which we have documented for public consumption since. Comrade Greenstein took part in that debate (as a non-member, in the role of a sort of ‘expert witness’, and finally lost. He’s never got over that.

One other true point that Greenstein makes is that to dismiss Jewish opponents (like himself) of the right of the state of Israel to exist as “self-hating Jews” would be a cheap and unworthy charge. It’s one that we in the AWL have never made. But the converse also applies: just because Greenstein happens to be Jewish does not give his view on the subject any particular authority.

Greenstein can rant and rave for all he likes about the reactionary and middle-class origins of ‘Zionism’. What he continually fails to address are the following propositions:

• first, since 1948 the only meaningful definition of ‘Zionism’ is support for the existence of the state of Israel;
• secondly, Jews are the only people on earth and in history whose wish for a state has been opposed in principle by leftists like himself (often using Luxemburgist anti-nationalist arguments that are not applied to any other peoples);
• thirdly, the fact that a tiny minority of Zionists saw some advantage to be made for their cause from Nazism is exactly comparable to the attitude of a tiny minority of Irish republicans and Indian nationalists. Greenstein does not denounce those movements on the same grounds;
• fourthly, anti-semitism is still a potent force in British society (witness recent outbursts from Tam Dalyell and Richard Ingrams - the former publicly excused by Paul Foot. These outbursts always take the form of ‘anti-Zionism’ and refer to the vicious treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. This concern for the Palestinians (which all decent people would share) masks an underlying hostility to the very right of Israel to exist.

Furthermore, when has the AWL ever stated that all anti-Zionists are anti-semitic? We simply make the obvious point that all anti-semites now call themselves ‘anti-Zionists’. The Arab chauvinist demand for the destruction of the state of Israel has been the worst thing to happen to the Palestinians since 1948. If the Arab states had accepted the Israeli offer of September 1967 to withdraw from the occupied territories in return for the ‘normalisation’ of relations (ie, recognition of Israel’s right to exist), then the colonialist horrors of the past 35 years on the West Bank would not have happened.

Tony Greenstein should address these questions instead of ranting about Adolph Eichmann’s alleged sympathy for Zionism.

AWL and Zionism
AWL and Zionism

Shachtmanism

Tony Greenstein’s very good article bears out the points I myself have made in earlier contributions to the Weekly Worker.

The AWL’s Shachtmanism on the Middle East is merely a slightly disguised way of supporting Zionism and imperialism. I hold no brief for islamic fundamentalism, but it is no accident that people from mainly islamic countries are portrayed at best as fearsome and loathsome ‘others’, ‘fanatics’, ‘asylum-seekers’ and ‘terrorists’.

Muslims, whether believing or nominal, are the persecuted Jews of our day.

Shachtmanism
Shachtmanism

ICP joins council

The Communist Party of Iraq has been ‘elected’ to join the new Iraqi ‘governing council’ that will serve as a civil cover for the Anglo-American occupation forces.

Of course this puppet government wasn’t elected by the Iraqis themselves, but by the Americans, who picked each one of the 25 council members. Among them there are well known Pentagon agents such as the banker Ahmad Chalabi, and also the leaders of the nationalist Kurdish parties, Talabani and Barzani.

The Iraqi CP will be represented by its general secretary, Hamid Majid Moussa, who a few days before his appointment met with the American proconsul, Paul Bremer, and his British colleague, John Sawers. The aim of this meeting, which a press communiqué of the Iraqi CP described as a “frank discussion”, was “to assure the security and stability of Iraq”. For the Americans this means crushing the guerrillas and the popular demonstrations opposed to the occupation. To back this repression and give it a ‘national’ and ‘civil’ cover is, precisely, the main function of the council. Given their appointment, it is clear that Moussa and the Iraqi CP have agreed to collaborate with this task.

In another communiqué on the formation of the governing council, the CP called it nothing less than a “patriotic government”. It is not a “government” for the simple reason that the council will be subordinated to the dictates of the ‘civil governor’, Bremer, who will have the right of veto over all its resolutions. It will be even less “patriotic” because it leans upon the weapons of the occupation troops.

Commenting on the formation of the council, the Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi called it “a shameless attempt to legitimise the American occupation ... It’s not surprising that the Iraqis have publicly repudiated it” (reproduced in the Financial Times July 18).

The Iraqi CP is a genuine representative of the so-called ‘world communist movement’. In February this year it signed a joint declaration with the Communist Parties of France, Switzerland, Germany and Greece, calling for the “effective reinforcement of the process of inspection of weapons of mass destruction by the UN in Iraq, based on resolution 1441 [pdf file] of the security council”!

More recently, it was the “guest of honour” at the “international meeting of communist and workers’ parties” that took place in Athens on June 19-20. Sixty-one communist parties from all over the world were represented, among them the Cuban, Chinese, French and Russian CPs, Rifondazione Comunista, the Spanish CP (a member of the United Left front) and the Communist Party of Israel. The CPs of Argentina and Uruguay sent greetings (see www.solidnet.org).

In Athens, Raid Fahmi, representative of the Iraqi CP, made clear his backing of imperialism - and was applauded by his audience. He attacked the movement against the war for “not condemning energetically the regime of Saddam Hussein”, which was precisely the argument of imperialism to attack Iraq. But, to put it even more clearly, Fahmi pointed out that “it’s a mistake to subordinate the struggle for democracy to the anti-imperialist struggle ... The question of democracy is the central question.”

Of course this ‘theory’ isn’t a new one: the “struggle for democracy” is the fall of Saddam; the “anti-imperialist struggle” is the opposition to occupation. The CPs’ representatives in Athens got the message perfectly clear: the CP of Iraq joins the occupation to overthrow Saddam. They ‘forget’ that with occupation there will never be any democracy. The struggle for democracy is, in the present situation, the struggle to drive away the imperialist troops.

At the Athens meeting, the representative of the Iraqi CP never called for the end of the occupation. That’s natural, since it was precisely the occupation forces that put the Communist Party of Iraq on the council.

ICP joins council
ICP joins council

Delegate duties

There is a misleading statement in Marcus Ström’s report of the recent Socialist Alliance national council meeting (Weekly Worker July 24). Referring to the vote on an amendment to the Workers Power motion, from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, he states: “Unfortunately, this included the vote of one CPGB delegate who voted in accordance with the decision of his SA branch rather than with the Communist Party position.”

The delegate in question was me, but I was not a delegate from the CPGB, but from my Socialist Alliance branch in Stockport. I voted in accordance with the unanimous decision of the branch from its discussion of the national council agenda. This is the duty of any delegate of a working class organisation when attending parliaments of the class.

Of course, as a member of the CPGB, I fight for its positions in the discussions in my SA branch. Indeed, I did so, to the best of my belief in the matter of the AWL amendment, although comrade Ström clearly disagrees with my assessment. Once the decision of the delegating body is made though, it is my responsibility if I am elected delegate, to carry out that decision.

Where would all the principles of working class democracy, accountability, openness and political honesty be, if we were to act differently?

Delegate duties
Delegate duties