Letters
Centre point
Emily Bransom's analysis of the Liberal Democrats was interesting ("Scramble for the centre ground", January 12). However, the assertion that the Liberal Democrat party is struggling to maintain its time-honoured position at the centre of British politics is erroneous.
Echoing the bourgeois line that capitalism expresses itself politically in a comfortable and inclusive "centre", comrade Bransom misses the point: British politics since the collapse of social democracy has become involved in a 'race to the right', defined most vividly by the Thatcher era of 'marketisation'.
The struggle within the Liberal Democrat party seeks to confront the contradictions it faces as a party committed to the centre when this centre no longer exists.
The 'Orange book' faction hopes to shift the parameters of liberalism right towards its Gladstonian heritage of liberal markets, which for many now represents the new mainstream. It is the 'social liberals' who are perhaps defending the old centre ground that, contrary to comrade Bransom's argument, is a place where none of the mainstream parties want to be any more.
Centre point
Secular question
I have a question. What has Marxism got to do with secularism?
In the Soviet Union, three religions were approved (christianity, buddhism and islam). The state used to have academies to train the priests, maintained the respective monasteries, and paid salaries and pensions for religious workers.
Marx himself said that religion is the spirit of the dispirited and the sigh of the dispossessed. Thus, one cannot say he was anti-religious. Marx was against religious oppression.
Secularism is associated with the rationalism of John Stuart Mill and Bentham, which is the philosophy of capitalism.
I hope you can enlighten me on these matters.
Secular question
Secular question
No stigma
The GMB Sex Workers branch is saddened that the governments review of prostitution laws did not respond positively to the opportunity to go down a more enlightened path towards regulation.
The government has decided to continue to promote the stereotyped and clichéd view of sex workers. GMB members who work in the sex industry know, as does the government, that the majority of sex workers, including those who work in prostitution, are not typical of the drug-addict victims that everyone loves to hate.
The GMB wants the invisible majority of sex workers (who make a massive contribution to the economy) to be allowed to work in safety and without the stigma that the work they do is against the law. The GMB Sex Workers branch believes that sex between consenting adults should not be regulated by the state.
No stigma
No stigma
Sober
Whilst I agree with a lot of what Terry Liddle writes regarding the history of the temperance movement, I do not accept his conclusions (Weekly Worker January 12). He is quite right that there were teetotal Chartists and many other working class and progressive supporters of temperance; many members of the Labour Party were prohibitionists. However, by no means all advocates of temperance were socialists.
According to the website www.pro-hibition.org.uk, temperance is a widely accepted part of islam. In predominantly christian countries, forms of christianity influenced by Wesleyan views on sanctification have strongly supported it at times. However, its biggest supporters in these countries have been women, often as part of what can be described as feminism. The strong temperance movements of the early 20th century found most of their support in women who were opposed to the domestic violence alcohol frequently caused, and the large share of low-income household income it often took.
Unfortunately, like the early feminists described, many supporters of temperance made the same mistake as Terry, with all due respect. They observed the social problems resulting from the abuse of alcohol and assumed that prohibiting alcohol would result in the eradication of such problems. This resulted in prohibition in the United States. As a study of the prohibition era in the USA will show, this was a disaster. What actually happened was that a major industry was handed over to unscrupulous gangsters, causing far more misery than the demon alcohol had done up to then.
We are experiencing a similar phenomenon in our society today with the prohibition of so-called hard and soft drugs. This only serves to criminalise the people who take drugs, and create an illegal market for such drugs.
It is the case that prohibition never worked, and that the principle of the legalisation of opiates should be upheld by the left. The fact is that, both in the case of alcohol and other addictive drugs, it is the ruling class that will cry for prohibition and stringent controls for the rest of us. They always have access to alcohol, etc - which they take for granted. They have always had their clubs, which were never subject to the same licensing laws as workers pubs.
A perfect example of their attitude towards (so-called) hard drugs was given by the debacle of David Camerons alleged use of these as a student. The largely ignored issue is that people of Camerons ilk can experiment with such substances with impunity and - if they become addicted - they have immediate access to £1,000 per day rehabilitation centres. Workers, however, are discouraged from experimentation through high prices caused by the illegal status of drugs - as well as custodial sentences if they are caught or become addicted.
I am afraid that Terry is barking up the wrong tree in supporting the prohibition of any drugs.
Sober
Sober
Hackney Respect
At an unusually well attended meeting on January 17, 60 members of Hackney chose their candidates for the May council elections. Not surprisingly, the CPGBs Anne Mc Shane was the only nomination that was not accepted by the comrades - though the reasons given varied enormously.
In compliance with Respect national policy, which commits the organisation to concentrate on a small number of areas rather than to spread candidates as widely as possible, Hackney will be contesting only four of the 19 wards. There will be two candidates in each ward and we will also have a candidate for the post of Hackney mayor. Rather embarrassingly, out of the nine candidates, six are members of the Socialist Workers Party - though not one of them mentioned this in their brief introductions, emphasising instead the various local campaigns (or non-campaigns) they are involved in. Not much of a coalition really.
By contrast, comrade Mc Shane was uncomfortably honest in her introduction - uncomfortable for the SWP comrades, that is. She welcomed the other nominations, suggesting that rather than replacing one of them with herself, there should be three Respect candidates in one of the wards. She said: While, of course, we fight to win, we must at the same time fight for what we believe in - and that is socialism. We connect far better with people when we are actually able to present them with practical answer to their questions and problems, rather than a lot of platitudes.
Although she received healthy applause for her contribution, the SWP (which made up about 50 of the 60 comrades present) was quick to collectively explain why Anne could under no circumstances be a candidate for Respect. Picking up on her description of the campaign she ran as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the last local elections in Hackney, longstanding SWP middle cadre Gareth Jenkins was at pains to distance Respect from the SA:
The Socialist Alliance was only a propaganda exercise. Now we are into real politics, now we are dealing with the bread and butter issues that people are concerned with. We cannot go back to having arguments about the nature of socialism and other such internalised issues.
Not only did the comrade dismiss the need to define the very society that even Respect is claiming to be fighting for (after all, the s in Respect is supposed to stand for socialism): he went on to claim that we do not need a candidate who is not 100% committed to Respect. We do not need a candidate who says what she believes in, whatever that means.
Brilliant! Apparently, the comrade only wants Respect candidates who do not say what they believe in - and there will be quite a few of them around this time.
His weirdest attack though was in the form of a complaint against the Weekly Worker: These people write in their paper about the young, naive muslims in Respect - we cannot allow anybody who says that to be a candidate for this organisation.
Now this borders on madness. But then the comrade is always slightly losing it whenever he is in the same room as us. He has previously advised Anne Mc Shane to fuck off and die and at the last Respect Hackney meeting claimed that for the CPGB, islam is the main enemy. He later called me a Stasi agent. Nice.
Annie, another SWP comrade, also attacked the Weekly Worker for its unpolitical and personalised attacks against the rest of the left. And Mike Simons, secretary of Hackney Respect and, of course, SWP member, argued that Anne would not add anything political, but take away a lot of things from the campaign.
In the end, Anne got three votes, though there were quite a few abstentions of people who were either not members of Respect or did not want to take part in this particular vote. The rather nasty attacks on us quite clearly show that we are hurting the comrades with our open and democratic press, which does not shy away from exposing the comrades undemocratic shenanigans and their descent into popular frontism.
Hackney Respect
Hackney Respect
Preposterous
Nick Rogers's latest article on Venezuela concedes a lot of ground to the Alliance for Workers' Liberty view, which he has previously spent so much effort criticising ("Take control of the Bolivarian revolution", January 12).
Rogers agrees with the AWL that socialists cannot advocate support for Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) party. He also grants that Bonapartism is a "useful theoretical framework for discussing a wide range of regimes", including Venezuela. He accepts that the working class movement faces the threat of cooption and repression by the Chávez government. In all this he is far from uncritical pro-Chávez hand-raisers such as Simon Hughes (Letters, January 12).
However, substantial differences remain. Rogers maintains that Bonapartism is defined by "the restriction of political freedom" or by the "squeezing of the political space available to the main social actors". He denies that this is the case in Venezuela and therefore rejects for now the description of Chávez as a Bonaparte.
I have previously explained in these pages that for Marx, Engels, Trotsky and others, the displacement of bourgeois parties by forces of military origin is the essence of Bonapartism. I think this adequately describes the regime in power today in Venezuela.
However, Rogers overstates the argument. First, there are some cases where earlier Marxists described regimes as Bonapartist, even where bourgeois democratic freedoms continued to exist. France in the 1930s and Argentina in the 1940s come to mind. No doubt there are others. Therefore Rogers's criterion is not one other Marxists have found decisive. Second, Chávez has in fact squeezed the political space for the main social actors, driving the bourgeois parties from political structures and hegemonising large sections of the left and the working class. The collapse of much of the left in Venezuela into Chávismo was a tragedy. In a certain sense, Chávez has occupied much of the space a working class party might take.
It is obviously true that Chávez has not (yet) restricted most democratic rights and that the working class has fewer shackles compared with the previous regime. But as consistent democrats we should not ignore important restrictions on working class action, such as the anti-union laws, the length of the working day and so on that Chávez has in place, or the instruments he has at his disposal to restrict freedom.
Also, Rogers and I have conflicting interpretations of some Marxist texts, but our differences are most marked over Trotsky on Mexico. Here Rogers makes two factual errors. First, he says Trotsky discusses Bonapartism in "a short, undated and unsigned article that was only attributed to him after his death". I assume he means 'Trade unions in the epoch of imperialist decay' (August 1940). However, Trotsky also analyses Mexico in Bonapartist terms in 'Nationalised industry and workers' management' (May 12 1939), 'Mexico and British imperialism' (June 5 1938) and 'Latin American problems: a transcript' (November 4 1938). His co-thinkers also discussed the regime in the magazine Clave published in the late 1930s. These texts indicate Trotsky's analysis was more substantial than Rogers is prepared to acknowledge.
Second, Rogers denies that the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas was a military regime. This is just wrong. Cárdenas, like Calles and Obregon before him, was a general in the victorious army during the revolution (1910-17). His administration included soldiers, although of course he created a substantial civilian party regime that became the ruling party.
The significance is not merely factual. Mexican socialists made good use of Trotsky's analysis of Bonapartism to orientate themselves against the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime, resisting cooption and warning the working class about repression over decades. So did others - for example, Hugo Blanco, analysing Velasco in Peru. As such, Venezuelan workers have much to learn from Latin American Marxists who utilised the concept of Bonapartism, adapted to their own situation.
Rogers continues to maintain that Chávez's regime is social democratic, because, he says, of "the very real influence an increasingly self-confident working class exerts on the direction of government policy". This is a very weak argument - so general it could apply to many different kinds of regime. It also vastly over-exaggerates the present role and strength of the new union federation, the National Workers Union (UNT) in Venezuela.
Strangely Rogers says I "miss the potential for movement towards socialism". Given that most of my analysis in Solidarity centred on the UNT and socialists such as the Party of Revolution and Socialism (PRS), this is clearly false. As far as I am concerned, the potential for socialism in Venezuela, as elsewhere, lies with the working class and its organisations, something I have expressed for some time on behalf of the AWL.
As for Chávez, I believe there is no potential for socialism arising from his movement, given its class character. As such, I find Rogers's proposition that Venezuelan workers can "take control of the Bolivarian revolution" simply preposterous.
Preposterous
Preposterous
Maverick history
Most unusually, I find myself in agreement with the general thrust of the article on Galloway and Celebrity big brother ("Maverick George Galloway offends SWP sensibilities", January 12).
One point. John Rees's claim that almost no-one could have been told about Galloway's appearance on Big brother is undermined in the interview for the Sunday Herald by Galloway's media advisor, Ron McKay (www.sundayher-ald.com/53545). McKay states that Galloway in fact consulted a small group of close associates, including his daughter. He adds that Galloway had been approached about appearing in I'm a celebrity and Celebrity fit club.
If you trace Galloway's history back to his days in the Dundee Labour Party and on through War on Want and his time in Kelvin, he has been nothing if not consistent in acting as a maverick in regard to any sort of organisational discipline. Rees and company should have been aware of this. If Respect had possessed the kind of democratic structure that you correctly call for, I doubt if Galloway would have had anything to do with it. If it had that kind of democratic structure, Rees and company would now be facing severe censure.
Maverick history
Sexist antics
I wonder how the apologists in the SWP and Respect will react to the sexist, bullying behaviour of Galloway in the Big brother household? The antics of this man involve ganging up on a woman with sexist language such as "page three trollop" and not criticising the usage of the word "whore" by another male member of the household.
The programme is very exploitative and, yes, these people are pretty ridiculous. But the sexist double standards come out and women do come off worse - hence the treatment of Jodie Marsh. Galloway claims to be a principled socialist and socialism includes the liberation of women - and that means all women, including "page three trollops". You cannot pick and choose those you want liberated, comrade Galloway.
What has Galloway actually managed to achieve in the past week or so? His anti-war views have been censored, but from the edited highlights the image we see is of a boorish bully (with feline acts thrown in for good measure) in all his glory. So what message is being conveyed? That it is okay to bully a woman?
Sexist antics
Hate campaign
A leading member of George Galloway's Respect party, Adam Yosef, has urged violence against human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. He has denounced Tatchell as a "hate-mongerer", listing him as one of Britain's top-three "hate-filled bigots". The other two Yosef names are Nick Griffin of the British National Party and muslim fundamentalist cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed.
This astonishing attack was made by Yosef in his column in the Asian weekly entertainment newspaper Desi Xpress (January 6-12). His article advises readers to violently attack Tatchell, stating that he "needs a good slap in the face". In a naked appeal to homophobia and xenophobia, Yosef goes on to urge Australian-born Tatchell and his "queer campaign army" to "pack their bent bags and head back to Australia".
Yosef has a history of homophobic outbursts in Desi Xpress. In a December issue of the newspaper (issue 42), he ridiculed same-sex civil partnerships: "Hmmm ... gay weddings ... gay people and commitment? I don't think so ... They'll be shagging the neighbours before they even cut the cake. Bad idea, I'm afraid. Great way of evading tax though."
As well as being a prominent member of Galloway's Respect party, Yosef has done press and PR work for Respect leaders such as Salma Yaqoob and Dr Mohammed Naseem. Dr Naseem is also home affairs spokesperson for the Islamic Party of Britain, which advocates the death penalty for homosexuality and the banning of gay organisations. Yosef is a leading light in the Stop the War Coalition and has worked with the SWP.
This is a new low for members of Respect and the STWC. Equating an anti-racist such as Peter Tatchell with a racist such as Nick Griffin is sick. It shows the dishonesty and opportunism that now characterises George Galloway's Respect party. Inciting violence against Peter not only brings shame and dishonour to Respect - it is also a criminal offence.
Taken together, the headlines, content and tone of Yosef's article is likely to stir up hatred against Tatchell and put him at risk of violent attack. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Peter is "hate-filled" or a "bigot". On the contrary, his human rights work involves challenging hatred, prejudice, discrimination and violence against all communities. He has a long and proud record of defending the Asian and muslim communities against prejudice and racism.
We call on Respect and the Stop The War Coalition to condemn Adam Yosef's incitement to homophobia, violence and xenophobia, and to expel him from their organisations. There can be no place in a progressive movement for people who encourage homophobia, violence and xenophobia.
We urge Desi Xpress to publish a full apology to Peter Tatchell and to carry an interview with him about his work for universal human rights. Yosef freelances for BBC Online and BBC Birmingham. We hope the BBC will cease employing him. His encouragement of homophobia, violence and xenophobia is incompatible with the BBC's commitment to equality and diversity.
Hate campaign
Hate campaign
Lesson
Recent issues of the Weekly Worker (January 5 and January 12) have featured some very interesting reportage and commentary about the state of the SWP.
The lesson I draw from John Molyneux's attempt to right the ship is that there is nothing to be gained by polite, half-hearted challenges to bureaucracy. The bureaucrats will not thank you and they won't heed your advice. They will only take warning and line you up to be isolated and dealt with.
Lesson
Spy hole
SW Kenning's report of the SWP conference confirms not only the need for more democracy in small leftwing parties such as the SWP, but also of the need for extreme democracy in society as a whole.
Previous issues of the Weekly Worker have dealt with the infiltration of spies in Sinn Féin, and the David Shayler interview demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the left to penetration by the security services (August 11 2005). There are lots of anecdotal stories of Bolshevik meetings being infiltrated by the okhrana and, of course, the duma representative, Roman Malinovsky, being a spy.
No doubt the left is aware of Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding's book Defending the realm, which gives an expansive insight into the work of the secret services. MI5 infiltrated the SWP at grassroots level with 25 agents over a period of 30 years up to 1990, the Militant Tendency with 30 agents, as well as other groups and the 'official' CPGB.
The SWP central committee operates the way it does to keep 'secrets' from the bourgeois media and the state, so you cannot blame it for being the way it is, but freedom of expression in a political party is a different thing - an issue on which the SWP is no different to New Labour.
Isn't it about time to move the argument from "So-and-so is a sect" and build a real leftwing alternative, so we don't have to be ruled by secret societies for the privileged elite - whether they are part of a small revolutionary party or our extremely powerful and undemocratic rulers?
Spy hole
SWP beacon
Why are "Building the SWP in Preston", "Selling Socialist Worker in the movement" or "Building paper sales in Derby" not legitimate topics for the Socialist Workers Party to debate? Your conference "report" is a joke.
I happened to go to the conference (my first) and was relieved to find that what you write about the SWP is rubbish. Your dreary little fantasy world, where the SWP is constantly on the verge of collapse, is pathetic.
The SWP has the theoretical clarity and perspective to orientate itself and intervene effectively in day-to-day struggles. The Weekly Worker, on the other hand, is a fucking leech. Its politics revolve around confusion, dogma and hearsay, which, at times, appears to be based on pub gossip. For example, in relation to your coverage of the solidarity action taken to relieve suffering after the Asian earthquake, a quick telephone call or a visit to www.prestonrespect.org would have proved that your story was absolutely baseless.
What you seem to resent about the SWP is its ability to link theory and practice. In order to do this you have to discuss things such as paper sales, building the party and how the paper is used as an organising tool in the movement. If the SWP only dealt with the abstract and never tackled the practical implications of its theoretical discussions, it might be in the unfortunate position of your irrelevant organisation, whose only impact is to get on the tits of people who muck in and try to make a difference.
By the way, your paper is not read by thousands of SWP members because it is a beacon of democracy, but because it is the only leftist rag irresponsible enough to publish internal documents on the internet. A socialist who uses the internet and googles something about the SWP will frequently stumble across the Weekly Worker. However, that in no way suggests political support.
Your claim that there has been no serious discussion about our recent political turn is just bollocks, given that the SWP central committee has fought tooth and nail to get comrades to join Respect, let alone get fully on board. Why else is there such an uneven distribution of good Respect votes, even when there is an experienced SWP organisation around?
The central committee has quite honestly and clearly won a debate at SWP conference that has been ongoing since the formation of Respect at every national SWP meeting.
John Molyneux may have positioned himself as the candidate for democracy and whatever, but the debate was one of political perspectives and rested on whose analysis of the current period faced reality better and how that informed our activities within the party and the movement. It is precisely this ability to have real debates that translate into real activity on the ground that made me come away from the recent conference prouder than ever to be an SWP member.
For any SWP members who have stumbled onto this site, please do not give the CPGB the pleasure of excitedly watching that little "hits" counter go up.
As for the CPGB, don't you think it is about time you wound down the Hello! magazine of the left and got on with some real political activity?
SWP beacon