Letters
Red Surrey
The Red Party has, until now, refused to comment or reply to the accusations and allegations levelled by Messrs Hannah and Donovan.
We felt that to dignify their rants with a reply was to give them a level of credibility and also encourage more of the same. The latest diatribe, whilst not differing in either style or content from their previous harangues, does require some response in order solely to prevent the establishment of new myths within our already myth-laden movement (‘Centrist CPGB’, Letters, October 7).
First of all it is clear that in Donovan-Hannah’s eyes the Red Party is just one person - Manny Neira - and the rest of us are, at best, non-persons - mere cyphers of their arch-nemesis’s evil schemes. Therefore, despite the fact that in the two issues so far of the Red Star Manny has confined himself to commenting on the left’s malaise and upon the US elections, in Donovan-Hannah’s eyes all of the Red Star’s content is his and his alone.
This is clearest in their attack on our position on the euro. If they had bothered to read the article, instead, as I believe, simply stared at the front page, then they would have found out that it was written by Jeremy Butler, who presents a good argument that refuses to either bunk up with the ‘fascist-lite’ of the UKIPers or hide in the sand and abstain from one of the most important economic questions in the immediate future.
By the way, since when has it been a “Marxist principle of refusing to vote any confidence in economic measures which express the economic and political strategy of the capitalists”? This is a new one on me, and I believe that the logical progression of this argument would be to oppose any reforms within capitalism as ameliorations to workers’ livelihoods put off the revolution and therefore assist capitalism.
Donovan has, however, given Marxists a new weapon: the postcode as designation of class. It seems that simply living in the Guildford/Camberley area means that we are all super-affluent and middle class.
At the school that I work at part-time (my middle class job as a railway guard doesn’t pay enough for the mortgage), 40% of the children have English as a second language, 30% of our children have SENs and a similar number have free school meals. We live at the heart of the “predominantly working class immigrant populations” that Donovan is so keen on - although I believe he wouldn’t recognise one if it punched him on the nose.
Strangely enough, we do agree with Donovan-Hannah on one thing; that pre-vetting the CPGB’s internal e-list is damaging to its democracy. One of the reasons that the Red Party was formed was to make a break from the habits of the left that allow personalised and vindictive vendettas to take the place of political debate. We have better things to do than involve ourselves any further in these sad individuals’ paranoid fantasies.
Red Surrey
Red Surrey
Anti-semitism
Yes, John Black (Letters, October 7). But how does the world arrive at a “single democratic, secular state” of Palestine covering the whole country? After 60 years of sectarian Zionist/imperialist tyranny, you surely don’t still have naive faith that the ‘free-world’ will provide it?
To keep believing in utopias long after all the evidence has come in that they are impossible may not display the “crass lack of reason and proportion” and “vicarious anti-semitism” that you bizarrely accuse me of (you mean you disagree with me? Well, why not just say so), but it is not really worldly or useful.
A hopelessly wrong turning was taken by post-war Stalinist revisionism to resanitise ‘western imperialism’. It remains a monstrous affront to history; and the self-liquidation by the workers’ states, the subsequent sick turmoil of a ‘remarketed’ Russia, and the planet now being dictated to for warmongering by a philistine imbecile like Bush, plus the triumph of cheap consumerist culture everywhere, is asking human intelligence: is this rapacious, market-led degeneration the best that organised social understanding can come up with? There is no choice. ‘Democratic control’ has always been the imperialist class’s best joke. Markets rule until stopped.
It is revolutionary war which alone can now take civilisation forward. Asking revolutionaries to arbitrarily impose a revolutionary war on the planet is a hopeless plan. But the imperialist ‘overproduction’ economic crisis has given progress towards World War III on a plate, starting in Serbia and Iraq with deliberate, unnecessary warmongering by the crisis-worried American empire. And it is already a war disaster for a variety of historical reasons. Defeat looms for western imperialism.
Turn this hated warmongering into civil war to bring down imperialism. With no leadership, half the Middle East masses have already got the message. As the sides line up in the civil wars flowing out of World War III, the Palestinians who have assured Roland Rance (Letters, October 7) that they do not wish to “drive the Jews into the sea” will be in an unheard minority. The whole Jewish entity in Palestine will be right with the American empire, as it crumbles in war.
Anti-semitism
Anti-semitism
Two states
Good comrades like Roland Rance should take heed of the anti-semitic ranting of Royston Bull. That is where rejection of two states will land you. The Palestinians' struggle requires that you reject this racism.
Two states
Two states
No clarity
It was most flattering to get a whole article written in response to my letter (‘Women only and class’, October 7). The article promised “clarity”, but delivered anything but. So to get some clarity let us have a few simple points.
First, the autonomous organisation of specifically oppressed people - in this case women - should not be confused with separatism. Autonomous organisation is enabling a democratic way for women to speak for themselves about the oppression they face.
Secondly, having specifically oppressed groups speak for themselves in an organised way is something that over the years has been seen to strengthen and energise the class struggle in general. One example of this is the Women against Pit Closures, for instance, and the massive role they played in the 1984 miners’ strike. For these reasons it is clear that Marxists should embrace the self-organisation of women and other specifically oppressed groups in society.
Indeed I think Marxists should go further and have the self-confidence to recognise the leadership of autonomously organised women in the struggle for women’s liberation. This is not to oppose the involvement of men in the struggle for women’s liberation. It should be natural for any revolutionary to wish to stand firm with any group of people fighting against the oppression they face. Indeed for the working class to ever learn how to free itself as a whole such a response must become the response of broad layers of the class.
Finally, I would suggest that this is a more important lesson than the need to build a revolutionary ‘democratic centralist’ party. In reality the political effect of imposing “class” as an abstract concept, as the article does, pans out as each individual ‘democratic centralist’ group treating a campaigning organisation as a battleground in which to outmanoeuvre all the other democratic centralist groups. This is what will happen to any new campaign to defend and extend a women’s right to an abortion if men are around to control it.
No clarity
No clarity
SWP down under
Taking a leaf out of the mother ship in Britain and the growing abandonment of class politics by the Socialist Workers Party in relationship to Respect, the New Zealand outfit is the substantially shrunken Socialist Worker group.
In last weekend’s local government elections, the Anti-Capitalist Alliance ran for seven places in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and secured about 4,000 votes on a working class platform. We called for solidarity with the oppressed of the world, especially the people of Iraq and Palestine, and pointed to growing class inequalities in NZ as being the logical consequence of capitalism. We argued for workers’ rights and for the need for class unity across the divisions of nation, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, and for a new workers’ political movement to fight for the emancipation of the working class.
By contrast, the SW - which is now smaller than us - threw all its energy into the Residents Action Movement in Auckland. RAM is a homeowners’ revolt against rate increases. Needless to say, RAM did very well in the elections for the Auckland regional council, gaining over 80,000 votes, or about 10%. One prominent figure in RAM, who is the partner of the main leader of SW, got elected.
The RAM platform called for things like “community sense” and “more buses” and for consultation by the council with religious faiths, sports clubs, trade unions, ethnic councils and so on. In other words, their platform was classless and devoid of any coherent left line, let alone a working class/Marxist approach. To the extent that workers were even mentioned, there was a mere single reference to trade unions - which were treated on a par with sports clubs, community groups and religious faiths.
RAM is so moderate that its platform even entailed calling on people boycotting rate payments to pay their arrears if the regional council reduces rates just to 2002 levels!
SWP down under
SWP down under
Enemy's enemy
“Solidarity With Iraq’s workers! The Stop the War Coalition reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by what ever means they find necessary, to secure such ends” (Stop the War Coalition, October 2004).
This is the tail end of the latest STWC statement put out by Andrew Murray and Lindsey German. The statement comes immediately after the execution of Liverpool engineer Ken Bigley and the timing of it is such as to reaffirm the STWC’s position in the aftermath of the execution. As such it represents a further degeneration of the politics of the Stop the War Coalition and its dominant force, the Socialist Workers Party.
The Iraqi people are identified exclusively with the medieval, feudal-minded bigots who carried out the act while videoing the murder. We have no right to say how they conduct their struggle in the view of the STWC. Nevertheless the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions is singled out for condemnation in the statement because of its UK representatives’ support for Allawi’s potential presence at the Labour Party conference. So, criticising Iraqi people actually is OK, as long as you confine it to trade unionists and do not attack the ‘resistance’.
The STWC and SWP position is underpinned by a deeply flawed ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ philosophy. The big enemy is American imperialism and a defeat for it is automatically a victory for the people of Iraq and beyond.
But there is no national liberation movement in Iraq. There are a series of deeply reactionary militias who are islamist or Ba’athist to different degrees. They offer no future hope to the people of Iraq. Their vision is of an Iranian-type fundamentalist state. They are the enemies of all progressive-minded people and in circumstances where a mass trade union movement has been reborn as an unintended consequence of the invasion and this movement desperately needs international support, this statement demonstrates a betrayal by the SWP et al of the Iraqi working class on a large scale.
Like the inhabitants of Animal farm, who look from pig to human and back and cannot tell the difference, one looks from the SWP to the CP and back with similar disbelief.
Enemy's enemy
Enemy's enemy
Military support
Funny that us genuine Trotskyists have no problem over the question of which side to support in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike Paul Hampton (Letters, October 7).
As I said in the last issue, genuine communists take a side in a military conflict between imperialist and non-imperialist forces (and ‘non-imperialist’ doesn’t necessarily imply anti-imperialist). This is not a moral issue, but a tactical one, for imperialism exacerbates national (and even religious) tensions to boiling point, uniting workers with ‘their’ class oppressors in a common effort to rid the country of the imperialist invaders. We militarily support the non-imperialists because we want the imperialists to be defeated.
Likewise, defeatism is a political tactic to drive a wedge between the workers and ‘their’ class oppressors, to counter the patriotism that is necessary to effectively regiment the workers in preparation for their slaughter. Therefore it would not be at all inconsistent for a workers’ party in imperialist country A to counter the country’s war moves against imperialist country B, while its section in country B adopts the same line against the war in country B against its war moves against country A. We are against workers slaughtering one another in the interests of ‘their’ oppressors.
So simple.
Military support
Military support
Over what
Comrade Ian Donovan seems to be living in a world of his own. Firstly, according to Ian, the CPGB is “refusing to explicitly solidarise with the popular uprisings that were taking place in Fallujah”, which he believes to be part of the organisation’s “refusal to unconditionally defend the right of self-determination of Iraq” (Letters, October 7).
Yet, when you pick up the Weekly Worker, what do you find? Well, the July CPGB aggregate passed a motion which, amongst other things, declares that “communists work for the defeat of British and US imperialism”; “our programme of action for workers in Britain and the US is to force the occupying troops out”; “the working class in Britain must focus on organising the defeat of ‘our own side’”; and “we would prefer the defeat of imperialism rather than its victory, even if it were at the hands of the al-Sadr militia or other islamists” (Weekly Worker July 29). Or, more recently, “Frankly, we communists hope that US imperialism gets a bloody good hiding in Najaf - it has no right be in that city or indeed any other part of Iraq” (August 12). And so on, of course. Quite how the CPGB’s position on Iraqi self-determination deviates in any fundamental way from comrade Donovan’s is something of a mystery.
Secondly, Ian declares that it was the “third campist and islamophobic political appetites” of “the ‘soft’ PCC majority” which led to the Weekly Worker “publishing (for instance) personalised attacks on George Galloway that undermined decisions that the CPGB (including its leadership) had voted for in its two aggregates”. Comrade Donovan invites us to conclude that this “islamophobia” is symptomatic of the CPGB’s “political degeneration”.
To claim that the CPGB’s politics on Iraq or Respect are shaped or driven in any way by “islamophobia” is self-evidently absurd - just as it is to ascribe the SWP’s position on Israel/Zionism to “anti-semitism”. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that Ian really thinks this is the case. Instead of dealing with what we actually write, he imagines what is inside our heads (“third campist”?) and polemicises against that.
As far as I can tell, Ian’s concrete criticisms of our position on Respect seem to centre on the graphic published in the Weekly Worker depicting a pregnant George Galloway. This, says comrade Donovan, was “personally insulting” (Letters, September 30). Now, I can understand some male chauvinist bigot claiming that to be portrayed as a woman would be demeaning, but why would any progressive person, let alone a communist, be offended?
Ian must know that his genuine differences with us - once you strip away the hyperbole - are actually those of nuance. So, in order to cover his retreat from the CPGB (over … what?), he tries to imply that he would have been prevented from expressing his differences had he remained. This is because the moderation (“pre-vetting”) of our email discussion list amounts to “‘editorial control’ over private debate” (original emphasis, October 7).
What nonsense. Since when has debate in an official party forum been considered “private”? The email list is to facilitate disciplined discussion to advance the ideas of the whole, not a channel for individuals to engage in “private” correspondence. The moderator’s role is similar to that of a chair at a CPGB meeting, who, I can assure you, would insist that any two comrades who engaged in a hysterical slanging match, thus diverting the majority from dealing with the serious business, should calm down and perhaps think again before continuing with their tirade.
It is legitimate to argue that similar behaviour on the e-list is best dealt with as and when it arises. But it is not legitimate to claim that the very act of appointing a moderator (or chair) signals the beginning of a regime of censorship. Especially when it is patently clear - not only to CPGB members, but to the entire Weekly Worker readership - that we are champions of open, democratic debate.
Of course, Ian knows that very well. And, although he comes from the Trotskyist tradition, where splits over the ‘wrong line’ are two a penny, he now claims to agree with our view that differences such as those expressed within the CPGB over Respect and Iraq ought not to lead to a parting of the ways. That is why he is forced to make allegations of censorship in order to excuse his unprincipled and unserious resignation.
Over what
Over what