Letters

Even-handed

The Weekly Worker has rightly condemned the sale of George McNeilage’s tape of Tommy Sheridan’s ‘confession’ to the News of the World. No doubt too the leadership of the Scottish Socialist Party is complicit in this dirty deal.

Yet I doubt whether our paper is being completely even-handed in its coverage of this latest saga in the factional war within left nationalism. After all, was it not Sheridan who first crossed class lines in taking 20 grand from the bourgeois Daily Record in return for branding his former comrades-in-arms “scabs”? In an atmosphere where calls for perjury were rife, surely one can speculate that this was calculated to finger those SSP witnesses who refused to salvage the ‘family man’ reputation of Sheridan.

If it is permissible to call for McNeilage’s expulsion from the SSP, it follows that one ought to call for similar action to be taken against Sheridan. Both he and McNeilage should be branded with infamy. Of course, no action will be taken against McNeilage and action by Sheridan’s comrades in Solidarity is even less likely to take place: Solidarity was founded on an explicit endorsement of Sheridan pocketing cash from the Record.

This also raises questions in my mind as to whether our less than even-handed approach to the dirty deals of Sheridan and McNeilage is a precursor to the CPGB regarding Solidarity as the lesser of two evils and, thus, calling for a vote for it rather than the SSP. Who we vote for is, of course, mainly a tactical question. Nevertheless, the way that Sheridan has conducted himself in recent months raises questions whether he is fit to be a candidate for a working class organisation.

None of this has anything to do with his private life, which is his own business. Rather it has to do with him expecting his comrades to lie for him in order to protect his image and then libel them in the Record.

However, there remains a joker in the pack. According to last week’s Sunday Times, a source close to George Galloway has said that Respect will enter Scottish politics if Sheridan is to be tried for perjury. Or is this another lie perpetrated by the Murdoch empire against Tommy? I doubt it.

Even-handed

Yellow and black

The Scottish parliamentary elections in May 2007 could raise the distinct possibility of SSP and Solidarity MSPs (assuming they win a few seats) supporting a coalition that is highly likely to include the bourgeois pro-capitalist Scottish Nationalist Party.

In the past, the SSP at Holyrood has rarely supported the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition because, it has explained, New Labour is seen as a bourgeois party by the Scottish working people.

Could such potential support of the SNP be another indication of the ditching of socialist ideology from those parties who mistakenly believe that the road to popular support for their cause is through nationalism?

The future for the SSP and Solidarity, if they do manage to get beyond the May elections, appears not to be red, but yellow and black.

Yellow and black

Revolutionary?

“I disagree with the CPGB’s position that the SSP is nationalist and reformist,” writes Steve Wallis. “The presence of a few banners with the slogan ‘Make capitalism history’ underlines the fact that the SSP is dominated by revolutionaries”.

Does the presence of a few banners make a party revolutionary? No. Surely it is the programme and policies of the party that determine this? The SSP now does not do anything like the extra-parliamentary campaigning it once did (and it was never perfect). When was the last national demonstration on a class issue - three years ago?

The party can claim it has been preoccupied with the crises, but the conference did not reassert the need to get back to campaigning work. Instead it made it clear that there is going to be more of the same, with next year dominated by work around the elections and the Independence Convention. The very name, Independence First, is about putting class-based issues on hold.

Conference support for this also means another year of trade union work not being carried out effectively - there will be no union fraction meetings, no industrial conference, and no campaigning work around the anti-trade union laws. Marxist education will also continue to be blocked.

The SSP needs to refocus its energies and think about how its long-term success as a party is going to be achieved. After May next year it may not have much choice about the need to refocus on extra-parliamentary campaigning.

Revolutionary?

Cretinous twits

What a bunch of cretinous twits the SSP are. Are these people Marxists? They all deserve eternal obscurity. Who can trust their judgement? Who can trust that some of them are not long-time police agents finishing up a project?

This has been a sickening spectacle. Committees should be engaged in writing manuals on this fiasco, detailing how not to be caught up in internal divisions that can be exploited by our bourgeois enemy with ease.

Cretinous twits

Tommy’s builder

Graham Bash suggests I should have a period of quiet contemplation (Letters, October 12). Sorry, Graham, I am too busy building Solidarity - Scotland’s socialist movement.

As for Mark Gallagher, who is enthusiastic about John McDonnell’s campaign to become Labour leader, he should prepare for a disappointment. McDonnell will not get the 44 MPs required for a nomination. Gordon Brown will be elected and will continue with policies of privatisation, building new nuclear power stations and replacing Trident.

Mark and Graham will then have to say ‘Vote Labour’ and wait for the next left hope - or illusion - to arise. My original question still stands: Graham, what will it take for you to leave Labour?

Tommy’s builder

SSP reaction

I was saddened to read that the recent Scottish Socialist Party conference voted to campaign for “criminalising the purchase of sex” - a position “informed by the Swedish model” (‘Siding with Murdoch’, October 12).

The potentially reactionary implications of this stance were confirmed when Catriona Grant successfully opposed an amendment that called for the organisation of prostitutes into trade unions. Catriona argued that prostitutes were victims of abuse rather than workers.

I would like to make three points.

First, when prostitutes working in brothels in Paris in the 1970s went on strike for a week the number of rapes in Paris during that week doubled.

Second, during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper the police noted the car registration numbers of all cars entering the red-light districts of Leeds and Bradford. After a couple of weeks the police stopped doing so because they calculated that a large proportion of the adult male population of that part of Yorkshire were visiting prostitutes.

Third, sociologists recognise that many men pay for sexual gratification and emotional solace because they have not yet learned to find either elsewhere.

I suggest that Catriona Grant and her reactionary feminist SSP comrades visit the website of the International Union of Sex Workers (www.iusw.org/start/) for a more balanced view of prostitution.

SSP reaction
SSP reaction

Family control

The working class suffered a historic (and horrific) defeat with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which sent shockwaves through time itself. Its effects will be felt for generations. The capitalist class breathed a sigh of relief and swore never again to allow a repeat of 1917. The time had come to crack the whip against the defeated working class - to ‘call in the loan’, so to speak.

This necessarily includes the forcible re-imposition of the dictatorship of the nuclear family, the repository of bourgeois values, in the name of re-establishing capitalist social order. Age-of-consent laws are not (and never were) designed to protect children, but rather to protect the family. Children must not grow up to be promiscuous, but rather monogamous. Want to have sex? Get married.

The family is a powerful instrument of social control.

Family control
Family control

Party fudge?

Hillel Ticktin writes that democracy is an absolute founding principle of both a Marxist party and any new society (‘The call for a party’, October 12). Yet in some circumstances he seems prepared to accept a lack of democracy in both party and society, which he believes can still somehow lead to socialism indirectly. For instance, Hillel argues that Trotsky could have taken power in 1922 and made the world a better place in the long run if not the short term (‘What if the left opposition had taken power’ New Interventions Vol 8, No2).

So he accepts the bureaucratic centralism that Mike Macnair correctly rejects prior to the onset of Stalinism as a fact of history, stating that Mike “rejects the actual history of the Soviet Union before Stalinism, but wants the party”. Bureaucratic centralism or what comrade Macnair describes as Bonapartist centralism is understood as secondary, non-causal or dispensable in a period of retreat. Hillel appears to think that sometimes we cannot wait for true freedom or full democracy from below.

In his New Interventions article, Hillel poses a question: do we go down fighting for the Marxist programme or wait for democracy and better times? Or, as Lenin put it during the Brest-Litovsk debate, the party has to go through the cowshed, or the shit. According to comrade Ticktin, we might have to accept undemocratic methods - even dictatorship and coercion - for limited periods.

Hillel accuses Mike Macnair of using a Hegelian method by superimposing the absence of democracy on the real movement of history between 1919 and 1923. Surely Hillel’s own view on this period is idealist. Somehow the socialist leaders exercising a dictatorship can remain true Marxists and preserve the potential of socialism even when up to their necks in non-socialist shit.

According to comrade Ticktin, “We must stand clearly for a one-stage change to socialism, not two or more stages in which we first get democracy, then socialism.” Myself and other comrades have made this point many times in recent years. But Hillel also stands for the party to include a variety of Marxist views. Does he view the CPGB and the Revolutionary Democratic Group theory of stages as Stalinist? And how can the party be clearly against stages that are rooted in some of Lenin’s theorising, particularly Two tactics in the democratic revolution, and include the CPGB and RDG?

Hillel has not put forward any ‘Where we stand’ statement as an alternative to Mike Macnair’s commitments. Whereas myself, Matthew Jones, Dave Spencer and other comrades are looking to the November conference to set up a national steering committee, with local branches and a membership structure for the Campaign for a Marxist Party, Hillel seems to take a different view: “We are calling for the founding of a loose agglomeration of interested people and groupings who will exchange ideas and means of operation, towards that goal.”

I hope I have got the wrong impression, but this sounds more like a discussion forum or a fudging of the need to take concrete organisational steps.

Party fudge?

Liberalism

Jim Moody is wholly confused about the issues raised following Jack Straw’s comments about the full-face veil.

Straw’s remarks may, or may not, be part of a climate of growing hostility to muslims. As a former home secretary and a christian socialist, he himself has encouraged the importance of religious ‘community leaders’, and therefore the communalism that is an underlying condition for these developments. Furthermore it is right, for example, to criticise his role as a promoter of the war on Iraq, which tends to be viewed as a faith-based conflict, and is, rather more certainly, a murderous imperialist attack on millions of people.

However, Moody claims that there is a “perfect right” to wear the veil, including the niqab. Rights, in Marxist terms, are bound up with the social conditions in which they are exercised. They always imply an obligation to fulfil them. Thus, accepting the ‘right’ to wear this garment is to oblige others to recognise the claims of moral purity upon which it is based.

We would therefore have to adjust our behaviour to the basis of these claims. Furthermore, if this is really a ‘right’, it is universal: judges, police officers, people in all positions of authority, would have the guaranteed ability to perform their jobs while displaying their signs of religious purity.

Clearly socialists should not accept that any such right exists. It stems from the dream world of religious belief, and is part of the steel cage of regulated dress and behaviour dictated by one faith. By contrast one can argue that there is a duty of tolerance towards styles of dress and people’s self-regarding actions, whatever they may be. There are many types of dress one may find offensive. These choices may be endured by others, but not given the ‘respect’ a right implies.

There are still limits, though: I cannot see how anyone displaying ostentatious religious symbols of any kind can be said to show the disposition to fairness and impartiality needed to judge others who do not have this belief, as magistrates, benefit officers or social workers.

In any case, secularist Marxists can argue for tolerating the veil in most circumstances. But this is very different to proclaiming it a ‘right’. This would mean we have dropped our critical stand on religion. In short, by leaving all kinds of behaviour and dress immune from criticism, it would be to abandon a progressive stand for a nebulous liberalism.

Liberalism

Dress sense

In relation to your article on the niqab, there is no issue over whether anyone has ‘the right’ to wear one.

However, that does not mean it is appropriate to wear anything in any circumstances, including the niqab. Native Americans claim the right to perform their ancient dances and wear their traditional costumes - who would argue with that? But if someone turns up in a buffalo mask with eagle feathers sticking out of their bum and feet to teach mathematics, then frankly they are not going to be taken seriously.

A niqab is not an appropriate garment for teaching languages to little kids. One would have thought the average primary kid will either think it is a joke or else be terrified. If a woman turns up wearing the same outfit to teach swimming, hockey or gymnastics, isn’t it perfect common sense to suggest this particular outfit, which is fine on other occasions, isn’t really suitable?

Dress sense

Seed of doubt

Your observations on the niqab ignore the fact that the sole, focused intention of Islam is to destroy every other governmental system on earth. That includes Marxism.

You are supporting the seeds of your own political extinction. If you wish to further socialism, you must help defeat Islam.

Seed of doubt

One state

In reply to the critics of a two-state solution to the Israel-Arab conflict (T Greenstein, N Malik, D Walters, S Hughes Weekly Worker October 12), this position is a response to the long failure of the idea of a ‘one-state secular Palestine’. Actually, far from “discredited” (contra N Malik), it is gaining support because it is the only just solution for both sides.

Most on the left and - let it be said - the far right - start from the position that Israel should be destroyed (Tony Greenstein et al), and work backwards from this conclusion. The motivation for this position speaks for itself.

The idea of a ‘right of return’ is a veil for the demographic destruction of Israel and the establishment of an islamic state. Mr Malik imagines that islamism is not a reactionary ideology. Tell that to the socialists, communists, Bahai faith organisation, Jews, christians, liberals, trade unionists, etc in islamic states (many will not be alive to hear). Indeed Jack Straw has only said what the far left is too frightened to say, and he should go further: keep religion out of schools and colleges! Separate church and state!

And in fact one can distinguish between British and American capitalism and reactionary regimes: the Allies and the Soviet Union defeating fascism is a good example of progress against reaction. Then Simon Hughes forgets that the land occupied following war (war against Israel! Yes, this, latter, point, too, is forgotten) was offered in the peace process for a Palestinian state on condition that the right of Israel to exist be accepted, but this was impossible for Arafat to agree to precisely because of the islamists on the Palestinian side.

Backing islam against America is a cheap trick by the SWP and its guru, George Galloway, but it has nothing to do with socialism. Colluding with forces that want to destroy Israel is reactionary for the reasons Peter Manson advanced, and because the two-state solution gives Israel the recognition it deserves as a non-racial focal point for the revival of the Jewish cultural heritage largely destroyed in Europe due to fascism and Stalinism.

One state

Mao and then

I enjoyed Mike Macnair’s perspective on the Elbaum book (‘New left for old’, October 12).

The most salient point is that Trotskyist groups let a whole generation of radicalised youth slip from their hands by abstaining from the ‘anti-imperialist’ student milieu, focusing solely on mass action instead. The Trotskyists did recruit thousands, but probably at a ratio of one for every 10 students converted to Maoism and ‘anti-revisionism’.

It is not true, as Mike suggests, that the working class base of British Trotskyism was stronger than the working class base of US Maoism. We ‘know’, of course, of student Maoist growth in the 1960s and 1970s, but most Maoist groups had serious industrial perspectives with hundreds, maybe thousands, of members joining the big industrial unions and playing important roles.

When the US Socialist Workers Party entered (late) the industrial unions in 1976, just about everywhere we turned there were Maoist or anti-revisionist cadre. I know Elbaum doesn’t cover this much, but it is basically true.

Mao and then
Mao and then

Syndicalist

Congratulation to Mike Macnair for the very interesting article.

A very small point: Avanguardia Operaia was a group of Trotskyist origin which no longer exists. It was part of an important tradition of syndicalist direct-action politics.

Syndicalist
Syndicalist

Shag locally

On Tuesday October 2 at approximately 6pm I was demonstrating outside the Tory conference in Bournemouth with an A3 poster titled ‘Save oil - shag locally’. A policeman looked at my poster, searched my bag, took my name and address and went away. Other police on duty saw the poster and said nothing.

The next morning I did the same again. A sergeant came up and told me to take the poster down, as it was distasteful. I said his colleagues the previous evening had made no such threats. He said it was daytime now and the law had changed - there were children on the beach. I said I wasn’t on the beach, but eventually complied and he went away.

I then moved my position and put up the poster again. One of his colleagues came up and threatened to arrest me under the Public Order Act for harassing the public, even though no delegates had complained, including the MP Boris Johnson who witnessed the latter incident.

So much for civil liberties!

Shag locally
Shag locally