Letters

Capitulation

Tommy Sheridan convinced a working class jury, who heard all the evidence presented by both sides of the dispute, that he, and not the unholy alliance of Rupert Murdoch and utterly misguided elements in his own party, was telling the truth. This is a victory for the left, and for the anti-war and working class movements in Scotland. A concerted effort by the class enemy to politically destroy one of Scotland’s most prominent class fighters has been defeated in open court.

Will the Provisional Central Committee be sending Tommy Sheridan a message of congratulations for his victory in this struggle? I doubt it. Because, like many of Tommy’s so-called ‘comrades’, the CPGB effectively sided with Rupert Murdoch’s scummy rags, and the pornographic smears they retailed. You publicly expressed approval for the conduct of those SSP leaders who forced Sheridan out of his position as convenor because of his determination to fight (and win) this libel case. And incredibly you, who frequently call on sundry elements on the left to ‘rebel’ against alleged misleadership, faced with Tommy Sheridan leading a real rebellion of the SSP rank and file against those who were siding with Murdoch, denounced this progressive rebellion as anti-party and people like myself who expressed approval for it as peddling ‘anarchism’.

The CPGB has a very bad record on recent witch-hunts against prominent class fighters such as George Galloway. But on the Sheridan case you have taken this approach of capitulation to the agenda of the reactionary press to its logical conclusion. Your continual whine about the healthier left’s constructive engagement with left-moving muslims is of a piece with this capitulation to reaction, but over the Sheridan case you really have disgraced yourselves.

Capitulation
Capitulation

British ending

I think I would be a wee bit more convinced of Jack Conrad’s deconstruction of Scottish nationhood if I didn’t know the conclusion will be the avowal of a ‘British nationhood’ - an even more mythical and unlikely beast.

It’s true that people in the 1300s probably didn’t think of themselves as English or Scottish, and to that extent national identity didn’t really exist. People knew what they weren’t rather than what they were. Most inhabitants of the island clearly were not Normans and were bitterly opposed to them on all levels. If the Normans are being presented as ‘the English’, then clearly people all over the island were in revolt against ‘the English’, not just the Scots. The Scottish rebellions of the 1300s were against Norman English impositions.

Jack lets his guard slip when he talks about Wallace invading “northern England”. How was it and why was it “England”? Northumberland had been a distinct kingdom and all of this region had been subsumed into ‘Scotland’ - the border with ‘England’ being south of Durham. Langshanks carved off the bulk of modern-day Northumbria from the rest of the lowlands and deemed it no longer Scotland. Nobody in Northumbria consented or agreed with this and there was no division between the people in what Jack calls “northern England” and the lowlands in any cultural or linguistic sense.

It was an occupation by a foreign power and Wallace as a conscious political act was trying to oust them - one would imagine with immense popular local approval.

British ending
British ending

Happy slave

For quite a while we had a hard working and sincere comrade from an SWP background attending our seminars. This individual always argued that the SWP played a positive role in mobilising the working class with their leafleting and organisation of demonstrations.

Unfortunately, though, when this comrade raised criticisms within SWP circles, this hideous crime resulted in being sent to Coventry. Recently the comrade has been allowed back into the fold - a kind of happy ending, you may think.

But bought at a certain cost. The comrade must not read the Weekly Worker and must avoid speaking to members of the CPGB. This is the SWP’s version of ‘socialist comradeship’, where the national secretary has control of body and soul. If socialism is the self-liberation of the working class, then it won’t be led by the cadre of the SWP. They have to surrender their own liberty as a condition of membership.

Happy slave
Happy slave

Selfish gene

Although I am impressed with your article, ‘The science of solidarity’, I am left with the feeling at the end that the message is ‘Honest, it will be OK in the end’, and Dennis Norden is in your office with a clipboard going through old clips of leftwing cock-ups (August 3).

The call for brotherly solidarity based on kinship is admiral, though I would have thought comradely solidarity based on the need to succeed as a group or tribe would have been more apt. I also thought, as well as Malthus, you might have mentioned Adam Smith, who suggested that self-interest could lead to cooperation and gave us the idea of the ‘invisible hand’.

You might have further elaborated that the elements of a self-reproducing system must include ability to control, replicate and adapt, while complex systems also include a method of selection. This need not just be biological and is part of similar phenomena, including vicious and virtuous circles, where self-reinforced behaviour drives the event until it reaches its limit and breaks down from its own contradictions.

Even if the selfish gene has been successful in the past, it doesn’t predict the type of world it survives in or guarantee that its evolutional potential is maximised: just that it beat its competitor genes, and this can result in a myriad of futures. While it could be argued that our selfish genes have resulted in a glorious view of life, are we intelligent and cooperative enough to advance to the next stage or will it be a harsher, more competitive world our descendants have to survive in?

Either way, it will probably be an interesting It’ll be all right on the night show we are about to see.

Selfish gene

Armed militia

I cannot agree with Mike Macnair that in a socialist society there has to be universal military training. It is forced labour.

Conscription is wrong, as it puts pacifists, people who hate the military way of life, and people unsuitable to bear arms into the armed services. Giving a delinquent a gun would make him or her more aggressive.

Sadly in a socialist society, we will need an armed militia to defend the revolution, yet people must be persuaded, not compelled, to join.

Enlistment in a libertarian socialist society must be based on volunteers, not conscription.

Armed militia
Armed militia

Unions, not party

We need to trace what happened to the League for a Fifth International right back to 1996 (‘Workers Power split’, July 6). It was then that WP started to go off the rails, trailing anti-globalist movements in an opportunist way, rejecting the Marxist method, abandoning its own theory of the degenerated revolution and pursuing its international strategy in an increasingly sectish manner.

The ‘new workers’ party’ slogan is at the heart of this. It is not a question of whether a new workers’ party needs to be built or not built: it is the trade union movement that needs to be rebuilt - if the LFI believe in the labour movement at all they should recognise that the movement is decimated by globalisation and needs to be rebuilt in a form consistent with a globalised economy.

Only then can the ‘new workers’ party’ debate be progressed. For now whether there is a need for such a party is an academic question.

Unions, not party

Tommy

So Tommy Sheridan has won his defamation case against the News of the World by seven votes to four. Why might the jury have reached this decision? They probably did not approve of this sort of intrusive tittle-tattle journalism. ‘Who is the NOTW to accuse somebody else of having no reputation left to defame?” some might ask.

There are, however, quite substantial grounds for believing that the minutes of the Scottish Socialist Party executive meeting of November 9 2004 presented in court, where Tommy was recorded as admitting to visiting Cupid’s sex club in Manchester, were accurate.

I was at emergency meetings of the SSP national council in November 2004 and May 2006, and in his speeches at both these meetings Tommy effectively acknowledged that he had made some sort of potentially damaging or potentially embarrassing admission about his personal life at this meeting, although he did not go into any details. Much of what has happened in the SSP over the past two years simply does not make sense unless we assume that Tommy did make some such an admission at the November 9 2004 executive meeting.

People outside Scotland should be clear about the sort of debates going on in the SSP at the moment. As far as I can judge, his wife Gail seems to believe all of Tommy’s denials, but she’s about the only one. Most of his supporters are not arguing that they believe everything he said in court: they are arguing that the SSP should have backed him unconditionally, even if this meant destroying or falsifying evidence. We should consider the implications of this approach: eg, what if the NOTW accused a leading member of the SSP of being a child abuser?

Although some people are backing Tommy out of a misguided sense of personal loyalty, the Socialist Worker platform have their own factional agenda.

Tommy
Tommy

SWP tact

Peter Manson says: “… the Socialist Workers Party used its block vote to defeat exactly the policy outlined by comrade Callinicos … at the October 2004 conference of Respect. The SWP’s Moira Nolan successfully moved an amendment to a motion on Palestine in order to remove a paragraph which included the demand for a ‘unitary, democratic and secular state’.”

But if revolutionaries force through resolutions that would alienate their allies in a united front, what then becomes of the united front? Manson is, in effect, calling for an ultimatum to be issued to all members of Respect, demanding that they accept revolutionary politics. They must, in practice, become members of a revolutionary party, or we won’t work with them any more.

It’s a different situation when the revolutionaries are a minority of the activists in a united front. In those circumstances the revolutionaries can fight to push the front as far to the left as possible. However, when revolutionary activists are in a majority, different priorities take over - including tact and concessions to maintain the alliance.

SWP tact

Unrealistic

Perhaps Zionism and islamophobia extends as far left as the Communist Party. Eddie Ford’s article on Hamas is indeed a colonialist view of every national liberation struggle from the Malvinas to Indonesia, from the 18th century to now (Weekly Worker February 2).

Eddie Ford’s view is derived from a very superficial study of history. If he had investigated further, including the history of the struggles against the colonisation of Palestine, he would have discovered, among other things, that both Abdel Nasser and Yasser Arafat had sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood. That the Khilafat movement, triggered by the events in Palestine, was one of the highest points of the Indian people’s struggle against colonialism. Gandhi lent his full support to the Khilafat movement and it created some of the best known icons of the Indian struggle against British imperialism.

Hamas and Hezbollah represent the struggle of the peoples of Middle East against occupation and ethnic cleansing that extends over a hundred years at least. The current resistance takes a religious form because other forms - like the nationalist, as represented by Nasser, among others - were defeated by the west.

Israel is a colonial state created through the process of ethnic cleansing and its current constitution is as racist as South Africa’s was during white rule. If apartheid South Africa was not acceptable to us, why should Israel, based on similar racist foundations be now? Why should the concept of two states constituted as Bantustans be acceptable to us now and how can the Palestinians resign themselves to such a fate? White South Africa was not willing to accept majority rule until it discovered no other solution was possible. Israel is having greater difficulty reaching that conclusion because of the backing it receives from the USA and UK for fighting the US’s proxy wars in the Middle East. Once that hindrance is removed, the Palestinian problem can be resolved.

Unrealistic

Divisions

David Walters is wrong in claiming the two-state solution for Palestine is exclusively a Zionist project. It has also been the policy of the PLO since the early 1970s.

They would have preferred a single, secular, democratic state with equal citizenship rights for both Palestinians and Israelis, but accepted Israel’s right to self-determination as the best way to resolve the crisis in practice. Thirty years on and neither side is now prepared to trust the other to the degree that would make a single state workable on a voluntary basis.

In the last analysis states are no solution for communists: class is our solution. The right of self-determination for peoples presumes a situation where class alliances cannot develop naturally because of ethnic or religious divisions. These divisions have to be tackled immediately in order to pave the way for working class unity.

In other words, the two-state semi-solution should be a policy for uniting Israeli and Palestinian workers against their misrulers. It is anti-Zionist and it is also anti-Hamas.

Divisions

Two-stage

In his article ‘What sort of “Marxist party”?’ and in his recent series on strategy Mike Macnair calls for a party based on the CPGB’s minimum programme of a democratic republic as the only form in which the working class can take political power. This is a particular interpretation of Marxist theory and just as ideological as any other interpretation. Indeed it is a rehash of Steve Freeman’s two-stage revolution dogma, but in an inconsistent and less logically coherent form.

Mike advocates a minimum programme to avoid a party based on what he claims is economism or Trotskyism which will generate bureaucratic centralism, a party with the strategy of a seizure of political power and a transitional programme and councils of action or soviets. He is against this commitment to what he falsely describes as a Trotskyist strategic line. But it is a Marxist line from the lessons of the Paris commune, involving the commune state or a transitional state which overcomes the capitalist division between economics and politics.

Mike’s minimum demands are not reformist in the tradition of the socialist movement, but transitional demands which he falsely labels minimum. As in other aspects of his polemic, the influence of a residual Trotskyism remains. For example, the call to democratise the standing army - which is a demand for reform and, taken by itself, is a minimum demand - is supplemented by the call for a militia or, what amounts to the same thing, the right to carry arms. The demand to democratise the army in this context is transitional to a workers’ militia. Although inconsistently he believes the Russian Revolution shows that only a standing army built on traditional lines could defend the revolutionary state.

Again Mike goes beyond minimum demands on democratising the local and national capitalist state. Although the influence of Kautsky on the power of the vote to reform the capitalist state is clear, he raises transitional demands, such as the election and recallability of all state officials on a worker’s wage.

If these demands could be implemented or had mass support, then capitalism could not contain this democracy. Hence they are transitional demands, which echo the programme of the Paris commune with the potential for an alternative state form. But he arbitrarily insists on the phrase ‘minimum demands’ as a shibboleth in a sectarian way to artificially create differences.

Mike asserts that the young Trotsky and Luxemburg, who criticised Lenin’s centralism outlined in What is to be done? and One step forward, two steps back in the same terms he uses to criticises the bureaucratic Trotskyist sects, did not really have a point because the split at the second congress of the RSDLP was not about these issues. Mike follows the Trotsky who was trapped in the cult of Lenin and projected an idealised Bolshevik Leninism as the party form.

Similarly the CPGB promotes the Leninism of 1905-06, with its stress on minority rights and party democracy. But this short period was overshadowed by the lack of democracy before and afterwards.

Mike regards councils of action or the move to a commune state in a sectarian way - as economism or a Trotskyist strategy, not a Marxist or communist strategy. And he is opposed to it. This is why he is not sponsoring the call for a Marxist party. He puts a particular interpretation of Bolshevism and Marxism before unity. The very thing he accuses the Democratic Socialist Alliance of doing.

Also Mike is not sponsoring the call for a Marxist party because his politics are still influenced by the late Trotskyist, Ernest Mandel. He is looking for other organisations and forces to do the political job for him. He is just an advisor to the Socialist Workers Party leadership and most of his discussion of the SWP membership is written from a Trotskyist entrist perspective - although he admits the membership are leadership loyalists, so the entry perspective is not feasible, given the undemocratic structure of the SWP.

Two-stage
Two-stage

Splitters!

Mike Macnair says that the Democratic Socialist Alliance comrades “walked out of” the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform in April 2005. This is an inversion of the truth.

On April 9 2005 at a meeting attended by 15 of the SADP’s 81 members, a resolution was passed by seven votes to five, purporting to disband the SADP and to hand over all of its assets to the Socialist Alliance (Provisional). Only those SADP members who were on email lists had been informed of the changed date of this meeting, originally scheduled to take place a fortnight later. Moreover, the motion for dissolution had been admitted to the agenda just four days before the meeting took place. All of this was too much even for the SADP’s right wing in the shape of Mike Davies of the Alliance for Green Socialism. He warned at the meeting that, if the motion were to be passed, it would be “unfair and unlawful”.

Four of the members present wrote a minority report and launched a petition against the purported closure. The outcome was that, at a meeting held in Manchester on June 11 2005, attended by 11 SADP members and eight new comrades, a decision was made to repudiate the closure and to continue the existence, the founding principles, strategic policies and pro-party work of the SADP. The name ‘Democratic Socialist Alliance’ is used in public work.

Whilst the SA(P) submitted to the reassertion of sectarianism that had scattered the opposition to the rotten politics of the SWP, declaring that the SA(P) was and would remain only an ‘alliance’ and that it recognised that the first loyalty of some of its members would be to their respective sects, the SADP/DSA pledged to continue to struggle for the unity of socialists around the fight for a working class party for socialism (see http://sademocracy.org.uk/bulletins.htm).

Comrade Macnair is obliged, of course, to defend the contribution he made - presumably on the instructions of the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB - to the consummation of the split in the SADP. He voted for the disbandment and his lawyer’s sensibilities were unmoved by comrade Davies’s pleadings. It would be far more productive, I would suggest, if comrade Macnair were to defend the politics of his chosen alignment in that split, than resort to Pythonesque shouts of ‘splitters’ hurled at the DSA.

Splitters!
Splitters!

Wrong analysis

May I suggest that the CPGB does not put the agenda of imperialism at the centre of its analysis and paint Israel, in serving that agenda, as victims (‘Fight for two states, fight for Arab unity’, August 3)?

What is needed is for the CPGB to engage with the unrehabilitated people who form part of the Respect alliance. That is the nature of political work. In working with people where they are, on issues that matter to them, one challenges their assumptions. One can have legitimate concerns about their political agenda, but we are activists and not armchair politicians.

The same indulgence that is offered to the Israeli people’s maladjustment to their ill-begotten gains should be extended to these unrehabilitated muslim fundamentalists. That is, of course, if the CPGB wishes to be seen to be even-handed. Go into the communities in which these people are, work with them in their NGOs and engage their activists politically. That is what real political work is about. In that way whoever has the superior political programme may prevail. However, to refuse to do so and criticise the unrehabilitated fundamentalists and fundamentalist sympathisers from the sidelines is hardly progressive.

As for Hamas versus Fatah, it is not for activists outside to debate the democratic credentials of Hamas or Fatah. What matters is that the Palestinian people have decided. Progressive activists once again should not undermine the choice of the Palestinian people.

Israel is indeed a settler colonial state. It cannot be a requirement that the Palestinians who have been territorially displaced and dispossessed should necessarily become pragmatic, given the intransigence and brutality of the Israeli state and the support of the Israeli people.

The bottom line is that the refugees have the right to what belongs to them. They cannot be required to return to some or other Bantustan just because the alternative is too uncomfortable for either Israel, the majority of Israelis or their allies. The people in refugee camps inside Palestine and the neighbouring states and the broader diaspora want what was taken from them. Progressive solidarity activists should not require them to scale down their demands to what is realisable and achievable.

That an Israeli nation has emerged over 50-60 years does not invalidate the legitimacy of the claims of the Palestinian people.

Wrong analysis

Single state

With an emphasis on “democratic, secular states under the leadership of the working class”, the two-state solution put forward by the CPGB still insists that Israelis should have the same rights to a state as Palestinians and it is the Palestinians who are expected to deny their own rights and make the necessary sacrifices in order to create that possibility.

After making the nonsensical claim that a single, democratic and secular state of Palestine would constitute a futile return to before 1948, Peter Manson argues that the possibility of such a state does not even occur to the vast majority of Israelis: “the whole of the 20th century since 1933, but especially since 1943-45, militates against it.”

The whole of the 20th century since 1933 includes not only the horrendous, 12-year persecution of Jews by imperialist Germany, but also the 55-year persecution of Palestinians by colonial Israel, but the latter, it seems for Peter, does not militate against Palestinians accepting a two-state solution at their expense.

But, says Peter, “progressive Israeli Jews must champion the democratic rights of the Palestinians to a separate state”. Marvellous. Perhaps the Palestinians will get 30% of their territory back rather than the present 25% or less. Maybe a mile-wide corridor to the sea instead of just the Gaza side entry to Zion House and perhaps another corridor to connect the Gaza lodge to the outhouses of the West Bank.

Palestinian refugees will be able to return if they wish, not to the family home and land of course, but to their original home “district”, where they will no doubt find suitable jobs as domestics.

To recognise the colonial state of Israel means recognising that it has the right to impose its will on Palestine, while the Palestinian struggle for the return of their state is classified by Peter Manson as the imposition of the will of Palestine on Israel.

The future for Jews is within a single, democratic state of Palestine and it is that, not any two-state solution, which needs to be fought for now.

Single state

Progressive?

Peter Manson’s article describes a “democratic solution - to be fought for and won from below under the leadership of the working class”. And yet you leave the class nature of these two states an open question. Surely if the working class in Israel and Palestine were in a position to impose their will against the Zionist Israeli state and the islamic fundamentalists of Hamas (and the other despots and dictators in the Arab world) we would be looking at a socialist solution.

At the demonstration in London last Saturday I got leaflets from a number of groups outlining such a perspective. Whatever else I may think of their politics, and of the minor differences in their calls for a “socialist federation of the Middle East” (to use the slogan I prefer), at least none of them promotes the illusion that a democratic solution to the problems of the Middle East can be achieved under capitalism. Why doesn’t the CPGB draw this same conclusion?

I noticed comrade Manson’s use of the terms “progressive Israeli Jews” and “progressive Palestinians” who must champion the right of the other side to have their own state. Is this an indication that the CPGB envisages the working class being part of a popular frontist bloc with “progressive” capitalists and that you do indeed believe in the reactionary fantasy of a truly democratic solution in the Middle East being possible under capitalism?

Progressive?