02.02.2006
Security, control and principled debate
Does our paper's fight for transparency in the workers' movement play games with "people's lives and livelihoods"? The letter below from Mike Davies, a member of the left nationalist group, Cymru Goch, makes that charge. Mark Fischer replies
Letter from Wales
The Weekly Worker says: ""¦ it is obvious any comrade employed in a politically sensitive bourgeois job would use a cadre name for political work - particularly if they wrote openly in the left press, stood in elections ..." ('Victim of "democracy"', January 26).
Er, if you stand for election you have to use your real name. If comrades imagine they can have one name for work and another for an election leaflet (presumably with their face splashed all over it), then they're in cloud cuckoo land.
Similarly, using a cadre name didn't stop the Weekly Worker from using my real name when I spoke at a closed conference. When I saw my name in the Weekly Worker, I asked them to delete it - due to job considerations - from the web archive. They failed to even answer my email and that archive was subsequently used against me by a Labour Party researcher who tried to get me sacked.
I have since lost my "bourgeois" job (isn't every job in a bourgeois society bourgeois?) directly due to my political activities. I would add that it wasn't as a result of the above.
The Weekly Worker should think long and hard about its role before playing with people's lives and livelihoods.
Mike Davies
(no, not my real name)
Mark Fischer replies
Let's get two relatively minor points out of the way. Comrade Davies is correct about British elections. You are indeed now required to use your correct name to stand - although this tightening of the rules is quite recent. For example, there are plenty of examples from the left's relatively recent history of comrades standing at local, national and European level using cadre names. It seemed to fall into that same grey area that allowed you to use a name you were "commonly known as" in a variety of circumstances - including encounters with the police. Nevertheless, last week's SW Kenning article was inaccurate on this and we apologise to readers.
Mike's point regarding his own personal problems with the Weekly Worker left me a little puzzled, however. We have in the past willingly removed sensitive material from our site that might have caused comrades problems - why wouldn't we? I actually have no recollection of the incident he is referring to, but I can assure both comrade Davies and anyone else with a similar difficulty that we have no interest in "playing with people's lives and livelihoods", as it is rather over-dramatically put. I suspect the reason we did not reply to an email from the comrade was that we did not receive it - although I reiterate, neither I nor any of the comrades in Wales I have had the chance to speak to recall anything about this supposed spat.
These details aside, comrade Davies seems a little confused as to what point he is actually trying to make here. Last week, the SW Kenning article asserted that the SWP's amateur dramatics over 'security' is actually "a mode of bureaucratic control over SWPers themselves - a crude policing device" rather than anything to do with countering external threats. Concretely, a young SWP comrade, Matt Kidd, has been accused of compromising security when he had posted a few sketchy details of the first day of the SWP's annual conference in early January on a non-aligned lefty website, www.urban75.com. Farcically, the accusation was given extra security 'spice' with the charge that - by naming a number of individuals - he had placed their jobs in jeopardy. The comrade was suspended from the rest of the conference and subsequently resigned from the SWP - a mistake, in our view.
We made the obvious points:
l Comrades who find themselves in precarious positions at work would naturally adopt a cadre name for political work - "particularly if they wrote openly in the left press, stood in elections, wrote contributions to 'internal' bulletins that were more often than not widely reported by other publications and attended a policy-making conference along with hundreds of other people" (Weekly Worker January 26). Mike Davies's point about names and electoral law is therefore technically correct, but actually underlines precisely the political point we were making.
l Comrades standing in an electoral contest under their real name are not really very likely to have a politically precarious position in their job, are they? The notion that presenting themselves to tens of thousands of electors (complete with a mugshot) is perfectly secure, but appearing either in the pages of the Weekly Worker or - even more ludicrously - on the bulletin board of an obscure internet site would drastically compromise their "lives and livelihoods" is so crushingly stupid it is hardly worth commenting on.
To summarise the two essential points we are making - if a comrade is in politics and has a sensitive position at work, they should use a cadre name; if they take a decision to stand for election under their real name, then the smart money's on them not having a sensitive position at work. It ain't hard, is it ...?
Next, it is necessary to reiterate precisely why the Weekly Worker insists on the importance of detailed reporting and analysis of the platforms of individual politicians in the ranks of the movement. Is it to either 'play' with their personal circumstances or - as some comrades moronically put it - for the sake of titillating the left with 'gossip'?
Nonsense. This paper seeks to dissect the political positions not simply of the trends and political organisations in the workers' movement, but also of those individuals who put themselves forward as leaders of our class. In this context, last week's paper cited Lenin's forensic approach in the aftermath of the 1903 split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. He insisted that it was the "duty" of party members to "make a broad and independent study of the minutes" of the conference where this occured, as this record was "unique of its kind and unparalleled for its accuracy, completeness, comprehensiveness, richness and authenticity; a picture of views, sentiments and plans drawn by the participants in the movement themselves; a picture of the political shades existing in the party, showing their relative strength, their mutual relations and their struggles".
This comprehensive approach would allow comrades to integrate the "brief digests of the speeches, the dry extracts from the debates, the petty skirmishes over minor (seemingly minor) issues" into "one whole, enabling the party member to conjure up the living figure of each prominent speaker and to obtain a full idea of the political complexion of each group of delegates to the party congress" (my emphasis - 'One step forward, two steps back', www.marxists. org).
Similarly, in 1907 he defiantly answered those critics revelling in the various splits and political controversies then embroiling the organisation: "Our party's serious illness is the growing pains of a mass party. For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the party are pursuing this or that line ('But who are the judges?' ibid).
Political programmes in the workers' movement are not disembodied entities; they are developed, carried forth and - on occasion - betrayed by 'living figures', the individual human beings who contend for leadership. Thus any suggestion that politics is simply a matter of the textual analysis of collectively agreed documents of this or that organised trend would only present half the picture: it would actually be a false picture. In a very instructive discussion of 'Character and revolution', in his Karl Marx's theory of revolution: state and bureaucracy, Hal Draper discusses this and make the observation that "two pieces of statuary, both representing the same reality, may be made one of wax, the other of steel" (New York 1977, p195).
Thus, the working class must know the people who purport to be its leaders, or, in other words, what these comrades are made of. This is revealed in the debates and controversies the party openly conducts in front of its class and allows that working class constituency to learn lessons, make judgements and understand its task in a more profound manner.
Which brings us back to comrade Davies and his complaints about this paper's apparently cavalier attitude to people's "lives and livelihoods" embodied in our open reporting of comrades' political positions. Now, dear reader, call me Mr Churlish if you will, but I do suspect that his problems stem less from some slip we possibly once made in reporting his name (which is certainly possible); more from the way the Weekly Worker has polemically roughed up comrade Davies, Cymru Goch and its co-thinkers in the past.
For example, in the lead-up to the October 2003 launch conference of what has eventually evolved into the John Marek-led Forward Wales, the Weekly Worker exposed the squalid plotting of CG members to exclude what they scurrilously dubbed the "Brit left" from the process. As one leading CGer put it on the closed Socialist Republican Forum e-list, CPGBers in Wales were "very aware that we intend to cut them out from day one "¦ Same goes for the SWP "¦ Given the nature of the gathering - rally, small groups discussing specifics, no motions - I don't feel there's much scope for them to disrupt (but never underestimate the bastards), but we may yet decide to refuse them entry. If some slip in through the net (we don't know them all) we have briefed the session chairs and they will take no shit. There will also be a CG member chairing the opening session. If needs be, we will chuck them out "¦.
"[In order the attend] the October launch conference "¦ you'll have to be a signed-up member "¦ for at least a month beforehand. Membership will be approved by the [FW] steering committee (with four CG out of nine) and the intention is to launch a party with no platforms and no right to sell unapproved publications. If the left sectarians are not allowed in to that initial conference, then they have no ability to wreck. That's when we vote on the name, constitution, statement of aims, policies, etc. If they want to join after - as individual members who have renounced membership of their particular party - then we consider them on merit (there are good people in both the SP and SWP who I'd be happy to have join, but they're a minority). Does that sound watertight enough to keep the poison out?" (Weekly Worker September 11 2003).
Predictably, our exposure of this plot provoked hysterical attacks on us - and, equally predictably, the issue of 'security' was prominent, albeit it in a different form. Thus, according to Kevin Williamson, a nationalist co-thinker of CG in the Scottish Socialist Party, a likely source of our article was "collaboration with agents of the British state". His fellow SSPer, Jim Carroll, went further, despicably naming a member of our organisation, strongly implying he was a serving state asset, and asserting that the most likely explanation of the scoop was "contact with a state agency such as GCHQ" (Weekly Worker September 18 2003).
As Phil Pope, a Socialist Alliance 'indy' of the time, correctly pointed out, "one of the participants on the "¦ list was probably appalled at the 'anti-sectarian' sectarianism of some of the other participants and forwarded the whole unsavoury exchange to the Weekly Worker. There seems to have been a public interest in publishing, so the WW has done nothing wrong. In contrast, those seeking to exclude sections of the left from any future Welsh Socialist Party have got many questions to answer."
Quite right. But the key point is that such political trends cannot answer questions in an honest, forthright and working class manner, given the nature of the project they promote - that is, to shatter the historical unity of the working class of Britain. Opportunist political aims produce opportunist political methods. Thus - just like the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and others - CG and its co-thinkers in the SSP found it far more amenable to create a 'security' scare as a means of imposing a censorship, a gagging order on principled political critics.
By openly reporting the true politics of the various trends and individuals that compete for leadership and influence in our movement, the Weekly Worker is engaged in a constructive project. We agree with Lenin that without such detailed work "there can be no mass party, no party of a class". It certainly has nothing to do with harming the "lives and livelihoods" of individual comrades ... at least, not in the sense that our critic means it.
However, given the politics of the likes of Mike Davies, it could certainly be legitimate to suggest that our project aimed to do considerable - and hopefully irreparable - damage to his political "livelihood". Indeed, we would regard this is an elementary duty of genuine Marxists.