Letters

Disgrace

I thought Tina Becker’s comments at the Brent convention of the left were a disgrace (‘Brian for Brent’, August 21). They show how far we have to go in the Socialist Alliance in building an alternative to Labour.

She spent most of her speech attacking the Socialist Workers Party in front of people who were perhaps turning up to an SA meeting for the first time. The howls of outrage came not just from SWP members but from many others who, while sharing many of her criticisms of the SWP, believe that these should be raised in SA meetings - not public meetings to select a candidate.

Many of us made this point to comrade Becker after the meeting, but she refused to take them on board, preferring to claim that the SWP were trying to take over the alliance and drive everyone else out. Is the CPGB preparing to go the way of the Socialist Party?

Sectarianism is putting the interests of one group before the needs of the movement. You often proclaim how open and non-sectarian you are, but here was the worst example of sectarianism I have seen since the SWP picketed a court in West London where Greenham Common women were being tried for entering the base. The slogan of the SWP - “only workers’ power can stop the bomb” was correct, of course, but utterly cretinous and sectarian to shove it in the faces of anti-war activists coming out of court.

So, please, get a hold of yourselves or you’ll fragment an alliance which, for all its many faults, is beginning at least to have the left talk to each other rather than taking their ball and going home in a sulk when they don’t get their own way. You are right: Brent East is a big test, but we will fail if we can’t have a minimum of fraternal debate and unity in action.

Disgrace
Disgrace

Ukraine scam

I suppose we should be flattered that Mark Fischer’s article, ‘Attack of the clones’, on the fraud against the workers’ movement in Ukraine (Weekly Worker August 28) takes much of its information from our website (www.bolshevik.org). Unfortunately, we are not surprised that the Weekly Worker cannot be relied on to reproduce information accurately. In particular, Fischer’s fertile imagination comes up with the following:

“A leading Workers Power comrade was boastfully displaying a photograph of the organisation’s recent world congress to an International Bolshevik Tendency member. Standing on either side of the said WPer were two Ukrainian comrades - they were instantly recognisable. They were the IBT’s key comrades in their own Ukrainian section.”

In fact Workers Power approached us in a principled and non-sectarian manner to verify identities and inform us of what they knew about the scam. We very much appreciate this, and the cooperation other organisations have shown in sharing information. It is typical of the Weekly Worker brand of ‘journalism’ that, in his haste to gloat, Fischer did not bother to check the facts.

As for the substance of the accusation of “oil-slick internationalism”, I quote our statement on the Ukraine scandal: “We will learn from this experience as we continue to work to extend the IBT internationally, but we do not expect to be able to avoid all risks.”

The CPGB takes no such risks, and is content to build an organisation only in Britain. That is your choice, comrades, but it is not internationalism. It was not Lenin’s internationalism, and nor is it ours.

Ukraine scam
Ukraine scam

Kiwi guru

I was most amused by the article describing how an enterprising group of young Ukrainians had conned a number of replicant sects. Particularly amusing was that the International Bolshevik Tendency was one of those conned.

New Zealand has had the dubious pleasure of having the largest IBT section - at one point in the early 1990s about 20 people. The IBT’s guru is also based here. As the political going got tougher in the mid to late 1990s, the NZ IBT - expert in how to make a revolution everywhere in the world, but unable to give its own membership much in the way of serious Marxism - went into serious decline. These days it consists of five harmless, middle class white folk in Wellington who are barely active politically.

Last year they dragged themselves out of the mothballs and away from their dinner parties for a few months of half-hearted activity on the margins of the anti-war movement. All five even showed up at an Anti-Capitalist Alliance educational weekend in Wellington. Listening to a tiny group of posh people, who have never recruited a single industrial worker or a single Maori or Pacific Island member (quite a feat in NZ!), rabbit on about the right line in Palestine, Ireland, Nepal and so on is an entertainment in itself.

At one point I did comment that I might be tempted to take what they said more seriously if they ever recruited some workers. This caused some chagrin among a couple of their more histrionic members. I was informed that they did have proletarians in their ranks: namely in the Ukraine (you see, they are internationalists, and so to comment on the absence of workers in their organisation in NZ was apparently an indication of a nationalist deviation on my part).

At the time they picked up a “Ukrainian section”, I thought it was quite odd. Why would any serious political person join the IBT these days, let alone a group in the Ukraine? How did they even come in contact with the IBT, given its near-dormant state? It didn’t really make any sense to me.

Now, of course, thanks to your article, all is explained. Unfortunately, I suspect that while most of us will be laughing even louder about the IBT idiots and their daft pretensions, what little remains of their membership is probably now too stupid (or stupefied by years of ‘training’ in this bizarre, wee outfit) to draw any critical conclusions from this sting. Indeed, I suspect that none of the various left currents involved in this amusing affair will link it to their warped notions of ‘internationalism’ and ‘party-building’.

Kiwi guru
Kiwi guru

Libya link

I am a leftwing communist activist from Russia and I know about the scandal in the Ukraine. In Russia a lot of left activists know about it. Everybody is angry about this fraud with Vernik, who is a traitor to the working class.

I know the real name of a man who is pictured on the IBT’s website (http://www.bolshevik.org/ukrscandal/ivan.htm). His name is Ilya Budraitskis and he is very well known in the Russian left movement. He lives in Moscow and is one of the leaders of the Russian left organisation, Socialist Resistance, an official section of the Committee for a Workers’ International.

A lot of left people over the world are interested to know whether the Russian leadership of the CWI is aware of the Ukrainian scam. As Ilya Budraitskis is involved, that proves that the Russian leadership also knew about it. Besides, the Vernik scam has been talked about on Russian left mailing lists for years, so everybody heard about it long ago.

I also know that CWI people from Russia and the Ukraine have links with the Libyan embassy. The Libyan embassy has given money to the CWI and the CWI every year organises a summer camp in the Crimea (Ukraine), where everybody studies the ‘green book’.

It is a political crime to take money from the dictator Gaddafi instead of fighting against his regime. Many people in the left movement knew about this link between Gaddafi and the CWI and even CWI members did not deny it.

Editor’s note: We publish the CWI’s statement on pp6-7 in this issue.

Libya link
Libya link

WP Ukraine

Readers may be interested to know that Workers Power are still referring to ‘their’ Ukrainian section on the home page of their League for a Fifth International. Time for an update, perhaps?

WP Ukraine
WP Ukraine

AWL methodology

Jim Denham of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty protests too much against Tony Greenstein (Letters, July 31). He states that “anti-semitism is still a potent force in British society”. Now, whilst it is necessary for socialists to condemn immediately and forthrightly any evidence of anti-semitism, just as would be the case with any other form of racism, one must keep things in proportion.

If one looks beyond the fringe of fascists and ‘Luton Talibanistas’, one will find that anti-Jewish sentiments are considerably less apparent amongst the British public than hostility towards blacks and Asians, and especially towards refugees of whatever ethnical or national background. But if one equates hostility to the state of Israel on account of its treatment of the Palestinians with anti-semitism, then, of course, the latter will seem a major factor in British politics, especially on the left.

An anecdote will illustrate this. Not so long ago, I was in what passes as London’s political salon (a cafe in Kings Cross) with Al Richardson, the editor of Revolutionary History, and the AWL’s Sean Matgamna. Both Al and I adhere to a single- state solution for Israel/Palestine, believing that the inhabitants of the area should be citizens of one state, all enjoying equal rights regardless of ethnicity or religion. Nothing outrageous, one might think - a little utopian in today’s climate perhaps, but hardly objectionable. Far from it, I’m afraid. Sean promptly informed us that this was an ‘anti-semitic’ standpoint, because it “denied Israel’s right to exist”. In vain did we try to explain to him that we denied the right of any state to define its citizenship on the basis of ethnicity or religion; no, we had an “anti-semitic” attitude towards Israel, and that was that.

It’s a strange old world, isn’t it? Accusing someone of holding an anti-semitic - ie, racist - stance is not only a very serious charge against a socialist; it is in this case particularly absurd. Here we were, arguing against citizenship being based upon race, only to be accused of racism. That’s dialectics for you.

It’s worth looking at the methodology of the AWL. It seems to be based upon a finding political positions that have not been claimed (or at least not claimed for a long time), or if they are shared by others, then extending them by a reductio ad absurdum. A cynical observer might call it finding a niche market. As an erstwhile supporter of the now defunct Revolutionary Communist Party, I am all too well aware of how left groups mark themselves out by exaggerating existing positions, or by going to extremes in opposing other ones.

With the RCP, I still don’t know how much of this was the product of a conscious decision to be different or extreme, or whether the positions adopted were the end-product of searching for a theoretical focus around which the group could operate. Perhaps the marketing and the theorising aspects were inextricably merged. I imagine that it’s the same with the AWL; it’s very familiar.

Let’s look at the AWL’s positions one at a time. Now, it could be advantageous to adopt Shachtmanism, as there hasn’t been, as far as I can tell, a Shachtmanite group in Britain since the early 1950s, and the bureaucratic collectivist analysis of Stalinism does provide a different and, for newcomers to the left, novel alternative to the ‘workers’ state’ and ‘state capitalist’ analyses that have been the norm in British Trotskyist circles. A possible market niche here, and space for a long-lost theory to be profitably revived. There could, however, be problems, as we all know where Shachtman ended up.

Now to Israel and Palestine. Britain’s largest left group, the SWP, and many individual leftists, go for a mono-statal solution, and are strongly critical of Zionism. Other individual leftists and the occasional group go for a two-state solution. A marketing approach aimed specifically at opposing the SWP would suggest the latter solution, along with an exaggerated approach to distinguish oneself from the other two-staters; combine this with a legitimate concern about the SWP’s shenanigans with the mullahs, and we end up with the AWL going soft on Zionism and making groundless accusations of anti-semitism.

Moving to Yugoslavia, the SWP, along with various individual leftists (including me), took a neutralist position, seeing the break-up of Yugoslavia as a disaster, and condemning all nationalist chauvinism and thuggery. Many of the smaller fry and various other individual leftists aimed most if not all of their criticisms against Serb chauvinism. Now, marketing would suggest an anti-Serb line, but exaggerated, hence the nonsense about ‘genocidal primitive Serbian imperialism’, and (to put it politely) the AWL’s almost invisible opposition to Nato’s war in 1999 - and its neglecting to mention for at least a year that one immediate result of Nato’s war was the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians from Kosovo. There could also be a trace of Shachtmanism coming in here. As a few misguided leftists saw the rump Yugoslavia as a ‘workers’ state’, a Shachtmanite might respond by seeing it as hell on earth, in the way that the latter-day Max Shachtman considered Stalinism to be qualitatively worse than liberal democracy.

The AWL seems to want it both ways. On the one hand, it attempts to present itself as a healthy alternative to the existing left with all its weird and wonderful obsessions. In reality, its papers and journals and its members and supporters are obsessed with these obsessions. Recent issues of the AWL’s Solidarity have looked at great length at the disgraceful witch-hunt that Gerry Healy ran against the group 20 years back. But its indignation sits uneasily alongside the ease with which the AWL wrongly accuses other leftwingers of anti-semitism and of being apologists for Serb chauvinist thuggery.

AWL methodology
AWL methodology

English pig

I found your article, ‘Scotland and English nationalism’, interesting (Weekly Worker June 26). We Sassenachs south of Hadrian’s Wall endure over-representation by Scottish constituencies at Westminster, an uneven distribution of social funds resulting from the Barnett formula, along with the anomalies of the West Lothian question. Frankly I wish I were a Scot. Democracy is terrific and if you’re a Scot you get a lot more democracy for your money than if you are English - thanks a load, Tony Blair!

Look at foundation hospitals. Frank Dobson (English MP) proposed an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill on July 8. The Scottish executive had already said, ‘No thanks, no foundation hospitals in Scotland.’ Yet the issue was a hot potato in England. Tony Blair faced a huge backbench rebellion from English MPs, indicating that foundation hospitals were not welcome. TB won the vote with a majority of just 35. Why? Because 47 MPs returned from Scottish constituencies voted against the amendment. This matter was of no interest to those MPs or their constituents. Have they no conscience?

But then I’m English and I’m getting pig sick about the quantity of democracy that you guys get in the Celtic fringes. The good news is that TB is not that popular now in England and the chickens are coming home to roost in 2005. Au revoir, TB.

And au revoir, socialist types with no desire to work. Wake up to market forces. Come the next election, you may have to work for a living and not rely on public handouts. There’s no such thing as a free dinner - you’ve got to work for a living in the real world.

English pig
English pig

Low expectations

Chairman Andrew Murray did not grant me the opportunity to say this at the Stop the War Coalition 2nd People’s Assembly on August 30.

The declaration of the 2nd People’s Assembly contains the following paragraph:

“This People’s Assembly further demands an end to the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, the transfer of political power in Iraq to representatives of the Iraqi people and the withdrawal of all British and US military forces from Iraq.”

The “representatives of the Iraqi people” will be elected, or appointed, under the illegal Anglo-American military occupation of Iraq. This means that they will be nothing but puppets and quislings.

One would expect little better of chairman Murray’s Communist Party of Britain, which has fraternal relations with the Communist Party of Iraq, which has a seat on the US gauleiter Paul Bremer’s Iraqi ‘governing council’.

It is sad to note, though, that the Socialist Workers Party has endorsed this sharp turn to the right.

Low expectations
Low expectations