Letters

Priorities

In his reply to my clarification, Mark Fischer exposes the problem with the modern communist left (Letters, February 5). He is grieving for the massive defeats of the working class in the last century.

Surely it is clear that working class militants of 21st century Britain cannot continue to carry the failed ideological baggage of the past? Marxist-Leninist parties didn’t save the working class in times of massive class struggle, and they won’t save them now. We are living in post-industrial Britain, not semi-feudal Russia. We must think in the here and now.

Without doubt, the Independent Working Class Association has done more to strengthen working class consciousness in the various regions it has been active than the Socialist Alliance ever has (except perhaps in the mosques of Preston!).

And why? Because they address the issues identified by working class people to be their immediate priorities - whether it is anti-social behaviour, drug-dealing, mugging, housing, mobile phone masts, miscarriages of justice or privatisation of services. Working class people actually come out of their homes and join IWCA demonstrations, pickets and patrols of crime hotspots.

What do the left have to offer? ‘Wait until after the revolution, brother!’ We don’t have that long!

Priorities
Priorities

Legalisation

After reading Eddie Ford’s article calling for the legalisation of all drugs, I must say that I agree (Weekly Worker February 5).

The police and healthcare officials claim that drugs can have adverse effects, but then again that’s what is said about the use of mobile phones. In the 1960s cannabis was widely used by people such as the infamous ‘hippies’. Even famous people such as prince Harry have smoked drugs and not had any bad reactions related to it. One police officer recently sparked debate when he claimed that if drugs were on the market for £1 drug dealers would lose business resulting in less crime.

I agree with this. Some countries offer addicts free drugs to keep them from committing crimes and it has worked, but the United Kingdom has clearly not agreed to this. Even former police commissioner Brian Paddock started a ‘softly, softly’ approach in the streets of Brixton in Lambeth, south London and it was later proved to be successful.

Legalisation
Legalisation

Miners

Twenty years after the miners’ Great Strike, is it possible to clarify just exactly what was the role and motivation of the Eurocommunist wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Peter Carter, the CPGB’s so-called industrial organiser?

We know the allegation that Stella Rimington - later director general of MI5 - headed up the secret offensive against the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984-85 strike, even to the extent of sending in agents provocateurs into the NUM in order to destabilise and sabotage the union.

Given Carter’s key role in stoking up internal opposition within the NUM to Scargill and Heathfield, and the Eurocommunist manipulation of the South Wales and Scottish coalfields to split the NUM and drive it politically to the right, would it be possible for those who held leadership positions in the Communist Party at that time to now clear the air by making explicitly clear that as individuals they never had any connections with either MI5 or the special branch?

Miners
Miners

Crèche crisis

I was elected by my union branch as our delegate to the Stop the War Coalition national conference on February 28. Given past disappointments, I asked the secretary to check whether there would be a crèche.

He has just informed me of the following response: “Unfortunately we are unable to put on a crèche at this conference. We have looked into it very seriously and the costs of a crèche are just impossible for us to meet. As I am sure you are aware, we depend on donations and affiliations from both individuals and organisations. The six national demonstrations, as well as the one coming up on March 20, leave us with very little money. Please apologise to the delegate who has a child and please assure them that when we are financially better off we will of course lay on crèches. [signed] Ghada Razuki.”

I consider this to be totally unacceptable and outrageous. It appears that parts of the left have forgotten (if they ever knew of) the struggles of the 60s and 70s to establish collective responsibility for childcare, and, with the growth of ‘post-feminist’ discourse, again see this as the individual responsibility of parents. This is no way to build a broad and inclusive movement.

Crèche crisis
Crèche crisis

Headscarves

The French assembly is wrong to ban muslim headscarves in public schools.

France claims to be a secular state. This is not true. The christian and jewish sabbaths are holidays in France, but not the muslim sabbath, Friday. The principal christian festivals are all statutory holidays in France. France subsidises religious schools. Crucifixes will still hang in schools in Alsace-Lorraine.

What is next? Will they forcibly shear sikhs whose hair is ‘liberated’ from the tidy turbans they usually wear? Will they cut off circumcised muslim or jewish penises that appear in school showers?

The ban on wearing religious garb and manifesting one’s faith we can expect from savage dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, but not from France, the very cradle of equality, fraternity, and liberty!

I urge the French senate to abandon this act of intolerance. In the short run, it encourages racism and bigotry. In the long run, this law will segregate muslims into madrassas, where fanatics are hatched, or on to the streets uneducated where they can learn a life of crime.

Headscarves
Headscarves

Patent abuse

January was a busy month for Ken Livingstone, what with being readmitted to the Labour Party and all. Yet it wasn’t so busy that Ken and the Greater London Authority couldn’t lodge trade mark application 2353980 on January 21 with the UK patent office.

What could this trade mark be? It’s none other than the GLA’s attempt to gain the sole right to use the term ‘Respect’ across classes 16, 35, 36, 41, 42 and 43. It is worth repeating the remit of class 42, namely: “Political lobbying and political research services.” How strange that this should have been lodged just four days before the founding conference of Respect.

By the way, trade mark class 16 includes playing cards. So there will be no Respect decks with John Rees as joker if Ken gets his way.

Patent abuse
Patent abuse

SWP cult

The SWP is a cult. The shouting down of AWL members trying to defend important socialist principles such as a worker on a worker’s wage at the recent Respect (how ironic!) conference is the living proof. The courageous SWP members in Liverpool and elsewhere who went against their central committee opportunist diktat on this issue should leave it and become better socialists as a result.

It’s in nobody’s selfish interest to be a member of a cult. And it’s certainly not in the interests of the working class. The SWP did the same thing to me, as I complained about their undemocratic methods at a conference on the war in Kosovo a few years ago in Edinburgh.

The other lesson is the necessity for the rest of the far left to be hard on the SWP for this authoritarian intolerance. Otherwise they will continue to get away with it. Their actions are partly driven by fear of alternative views carrying more weight than theirs, but also a belief that they can get away with this stuff and that does not reflect very well on the rest of the far left.

A truly democratic socialist social system can only be brought about by a genuinely democratic far left.

SWP cult
SWP cult

SA opt-out

At Sheffield Socialist Alliance’s most recent, and well attended, meeting unsurprisingly we discussed Respect and its impact on the future of the alliance.

Most of the discussion went along very similar lines to that within the Weekly Worker, and at the launch convention (which one SWP comrade argued must have had a far wider attendance than just the “old left” - because if the SWP had been able to fill that hall on their own, well, we’d be almost at the point of revolution! Funny, I thought the SWP claimed 10,000 members).

The discussion was framed around two motions - one saying that Respect does not negate the need for a Socialist Alliance and that we should still stand in wards in the local elections where possible; and one saying that we would put all our energies and resources into Respect in the European elections.

The arguments for the latter were that we don’t have enough bodies to do both (untrue, as around half Sheffield SA activists are very unlikely to support Respect, especially now), that it would be confusing and contradictory to be arguing for candidates from different organisations (no more so than saying, ‘We don’t care about local councils’) and that the Euros are far more important and could change British politics forever (you know, like the UK Independence Party did when they won three seats). The latter motion prevailed by nine votes to eight, with all the SWP members voting for the SA to stand down, and everyone else voting for us to continue.

Hopefully other areas will not be repeating the mistakes the local SWP have forced upon Sheffield SA - mistakes that will allow the Greens and the BNP a free run on June 10.

SA opt-out
SA opt-out

Real task

Jack Conrad and James York are profoundly mistaken for believing that exposing the SWP’s sectarianism and opportunism is the most important task facing communists and revolutionary socialists in Britain today (Weekly Worker February 5). Why expend yet more time, money and other resources chasing after these Stalinoid hooray Henries?

George Galloway and his cohorts have unintentionally helped the SWP destroy the SA. As a consequence, the real immediate task facing communists and revolutionary socialists is to help found a leftwing alternative to Respect - an alliance where the principles of revolution, republicanism and socialism are not horse-traded by opportunists, sectarians and careerists.

Real task
Real task

Alternative

I am writing to correct a small but critical error in Mark Fischer’s report on a debate between myself, Pete Firmin and Martin Thomas (‘Walk on two legs’, January 29).

It was reported that I said it was futile to attempt to build an electoral alternative to New Labour. I did not say that. I said it was futile to try to build an electoral alternative to the Labour Party.

I have put forward the view on several occasions that the reason for the failure to build an electoral alternative to the Labour Party is not the side-show of what the Socialist Workers Party has been up to, but the centrality of the Labour Party itself - whose continued existence, whose historical political expression of the British working class and whose base of a unified trade union structure - together with the ‘first past the post’ electoral system - is the reason why there has never been any serious split-off from or serious electoral alternative to the Labour Party.

I do not accept, nor do I believe, that it is futile to try to build an electoral alternative to New Labour. The logic of my position is quite obvious: that the electoral alternative to New Labour must be built from within the Labour Party itself. Comrades must distinguish between New Labour, the explicitly pro-capitalist controlling faction of the Labour Party, and the Labour Party itself which is, however weak and at present feeble, a distorted and bureaucratised political expression of the working class.

Alternative
Alternative

Engagement?

It seems to me that the CPGB’s ‘critical engagement’ with Respect could cover a multitude of sins - and perhaps the phrase has been chosen for this very ambiguity.

It could mean simply using a Respect membership card as a way into meetings, in order to argue for the politics that the working class needs and which Respect is a definite turn away from supplying. This wouldn’t differ terribly much from what the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has decided to do from outside Respect.

But ‘critical engagement’ could equally mean enthusiastically endorsing the project, while criticising its leadership. In the Socialist Alliance, the CPGB as well as the AWL campaigned for Socialist Alliance candidates - indeed stood our own candidates under the SA banner, while criticising the majority leadership.

Will the CPGB be standing/supporting Respect candidates in the June elections? Since the entire purpose of the unity coalition is as an electoral coalition, this seems quite an important question to answer. It may be that CPGB comrades have differing answers to that question. Marcus Ström, for instance: “We shall energetically work in Respect and seek a wider audience there for what is needed: a mass working class alternative to both Labourism and the non-class politics of populism (‘John Rees airbrushes out history’, January 29).

This sounds to me not very different from the approach taken to the SA. But other comrades seem to emphasise the ‘critical’ part of ‘critical engagement’. Since the AWL was accused of ‘sitting on the fence’ in relation to the issue of the French veil ban, can we now expect to see the Weekly Worker owning up to sitting on the fence over Respect?

Given the elections are a few months away and candidates are already being selected - George Galloway and John Rees in that particularly Respect-ful form of democracy known as the ‘behind-closed-doors stitch-up’ - it would seem quite urgent to ‘get off the fence’. Will the CPGB be supporting Respect candidates or arguing for the SA to run under its own banner? Are there minimum terms for support for Respect?

Engagement?
Engagement?

Resting

The conclusion of the article ‘John Rees airbrushes out history’ was that of the editorial team and not my own. It read: “We shall, of course, strive to coordinate with those individual socialists who remain in the SA. But communists have no wish to haggle over a corpse. We shall energetically work in Respect and seek a wider audience there for what is needed: a mass working class alternative to both Labourism and the non-class politics of populism.”

It is clear that the Socialist Workers Party is killing the Socialist Alliance in order to pursue its left populist turn in Respect. Apart from a dozen or so branches, the SA is inactive. In those active branches, the SWP is passing motions opposing standing candidates in the June local elections in order to pursue the Respect campaign alone. There will be a handful of branches in which non-SWP forces have a majority.

I said in my article that John Rees’s speech at Respect was his epitaph for the SA. John Molyneux writes in Socialist Review: “The Socialist Alliance was created for this purpose [to stand in elections], but it is plain, despite the odd good result, such as Michael Lavalette’s victory in Preston, that it is not up to the task. The Socialist Alliance is not linked in people’s minds with the opposition to the war and is not distinguishable on the ballot paper, except to a small minority, from any sect that can afford a deposit” (January). It seems that, for the SWP, the SA is no more. It has ceased to be. It is not even pining for the fjords. It is unlikely the SWP will gracefully leave the SA to those that may wish to use it for socialist activity.

It is quite right that communists should join Respect to gain a hearing for our politics and to expose the shortcomings of the SWP’s misguided turn. Yet the CPGB should remain in touch and work with those comrades not following our lead into Respect and who are not as yet ready to join our own ranks. The place for that contact is still within what remains of the Socialist Alliance.

Hence, my original conclusion, in part, read: “Those in the alliance pursuing an independent working class perspective must seek unity to expose the SWP-led liquidation of the Socialist Alliance. The revivalist euphoria of the SWP is likely to turn sour on June 11 when George Galloway’s promised one million votes do not materialise. Then we will need to seek a relaunch of a project for serious unity of the socialist left and the working class, if not the Socialist Alliance itself.”

The Socialist Alliance as was is dead. Where comrades remain organised through the Socialist Alliance, they should continue as such. Where they can stand credible campaigns for the local elections, they should do so. However, comrades should also join us in Respect and seek an audience for our politics of consistent democracy and revolutionary socialism.

Resting
Resting