Letters

Madness

If any further proof was needed that this government is now stark staring mad, it came in The Sunday Times via the Freedom of Information Act. It seems under new laws brought in by this crazy gang, hundreds of pre-pubescent children are being arrested and locked up for sexually touching each other! I had to read the piece three times before it sank in.

No, we aren’t talking about ‘rapes’ or assaults where one of the parties is non-consensual: we are talking about kids messing around in sexual experimentation voluntarily and with each other. This hasn’t stopped some of the kids being charged with ‘rape’, which now under Blair’s definition simply means sexual acts which are against the law, be they ever so mild and innocent. Presumably games like ‘mums and dads’ and ‘doctors and nurses’ - not to mention the debauched ‘dare, truth, promise and obey’ - are now strictly illegal.

Doesn’t anyone else think this is utter madness? Is there nobody in the legal profession now with an ounce of common sense to utter a word of warning that the madmen are now running the asylum?

Madness

No policies?

Some questions for the Campaign for a Marxist Party organisers:

(a) What will “basic work in the class struggle” look like and how can this happen amicably and productively without policies?

(b) How do you plan to attract young people?

(c) Is the campaign going to have agreed policies? If yes, how will these be formulated and the inevitable differences be managed?

No policies?

Don’t vote Labour

Mark Gallagher need not fear. I agree: life is too short to bear personal grudges or engage in animosity to other socialists - even if they are mistakenly still in the Labour Party.

I spent many years in the party working with good socialists like Graham Bash to halt the rightward drift of Labour. However, I recognise that we failed and in my case I was expelled for accepting eight years ago what everyone knows today: ie, that Blair is a menace to socialism and should be opposed in every way possible, including electorally. Now that would be a little difficult if you are still inside the Labour Party!

I agree with Mark that we should cooperate with socialists of all parties in wider movements. However, the problem for Mark and Graham is that Blair will be gone soon, and Brown will be just as bad when he takes over, but at the next election Mark and Graham will be saying, ‘Vote Labour’, while socialists outside the Labour Party will be trying to build an alternative.

Don’t vote Labour
Don’t vote Labour

No to globalism

Gerry Downing tries to analyse the current political situation and focuses on the creation of a shop stewards movement for a resurgence of class struggle and subsequently class-consciousness. In seeking a new leftward trend in British society he emphasises the organic links between the Labour Party and the trade unions.

The question posed is answered in a trade union manner when it isn’t simply a trade union issue any more. We have a convergence of nearly all political parties and all union bureaucrats for globalism, both right and left, as espoused primarily by the City of London’s programme: deindustrialisation, ending of UK-based agribusiness and the mass importation of labour - all based on a mass explosion of debt financing.

These material conditions determine this era. To break the stranglehold of globalism one at first must be clear as to what is happening around us. The RMT, according to Bob Crow, is trying to respond to these pressures by preserving its structures intact and not allowing a free-for-all in terms of jobs to all and sundry, as has happened on the buses. But a union response in and of itself will not be enough. A political response is required. To defeat globalism one must at first consider it an enemy, not seek to defend it, promote it and justify it under ‘Marxist’ labels.

This, I believe, is not the case with Gerry Downing’s new found associates.

No to globalism
No to globalism

Open Zionist

Tony Greenstein seriously misrepresents my argument and misleads the reader with his ‘black or white picture’ of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

He writes that I am “a supporter of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon”. Actually, I argued that Israel defended itself against Hezbollah terrorism and I openly questioned the proportionality of the IDF’s military response. A political strategy remains the preferred solution to the conflict.

He writes that the “desire of Zionism” is “to achieve a racially pure Jewish state” (Zionism as Nazism?). But Zionism is not as one-dimensional as Greenstein believes. It was a broader movement, including rightwing and leftwing, who emerged as refugees from anti-semitism and the holocaust advocating a nation-state for the Jewish people (left Zionists want to build a socialist Israel).

The idea that Israel is a “colonial settler state” also forgets that the United Nations mandate recognising Israel was based on existing Jewish settlements, as well as land acquired peacefully. Israel is, in fact, multi-racial. Look at any tourist guidebook and you’ll see photos of many shades of Jew, christian, muslim, Bahai and secularist, living together in such a small country.

Actually my argument is that the call today for a “secular state” instead of a “two-state solution” would lead to an islamic state and the liquidation of socialist and progressive forces in the Middle East.

Finally, in 1937 Trotsky recognised “the right of the Jewish nationality to its own state”. He wrote: “If the Jews desire this, socialism will have no right to deny it to them” (E Mandel Trotsky as alternative). If this makes Trotsky an “open Zionist” because he was prepared to think again, then I am in good company.

Open Zionist

Pogrom

Tony Greenstein never seems to listen to other people’s arguments. Ignoring the necessity of establishing a viable strategy that can win, or at least neutralise, big sections of the Israeli Jewish population, he sticks doggedly to his characterisation of Israeli Jews as almost eternally Zionist, and therefore unbreakably linked to the increasingly anti-secular, exclusivist and irrational trajectory of the Israeli state.

However, if he is right about the Israeli Jews, it follows that they can only be forced into the single Palestinian state he desires through an overwhelming military defeat. This indeed is his programme … and if comrade Greenstein were honest about it, he should admit that this would amount to a pogrom of terrible proportions. Israeli Jews would fight tooth and nail. Many would refuse to surrender. Nor therefore should the possibility of nuclear warfare be ruled out.

He hopes for the withdrawal of American support for Israel because this, and only this, would allow for the overthrow of Zionism by the surrounding Arab states. Doubtless he would like to dress this holy war in socialist garb, but he clearly views the US, not the Arab masses, as being key.

Apparently Israeli Jews are incapable of changing apart from leaving the Middle East (to where?), or being conquered. After all, most are settler colonialists.

Interestingly, however, Tony compares the Israelis with Canadians and Australians to ‘prove’ that settler workers always and inevitably side with their ‘own’ ruling class in opposition to the indigenous population. Does that mean that even today Canadians and Australians are irredeemably reactionary (and, like the Israeli Jews, do not qualify as nations)? After all, the Amerindians and Aborigines still survive as disadvantaged minorities, having not been completely wiped out by the settlers.

Tony’s proposed single state - to be imposed on the majority - offers nothing but humiliation to the Israeli Jews. Where is the carrot, where is the appeal to their humanity and class interests? As for the Palestinians, they can resist and suffer, but in effect will have to wait until the US pulls the plug on Israel. And all because Tony cannot envisage the possibility of building a substantial Jewish-Arab organisation in Israel that can link up with working class Palestinians to fight for a democratic, working class solution - against Arab and Jewish nationalism, against religious prejudice, against capitalist exploitation.

Because we have to start with the present situation, not where we would like to be, we have no choice but to fight for two democratic, secular states. Of course, there can be no solution within Israel-Palestine in isolation. That is completely illusory. That is why we have put forward the perspective of uniting the Arab states under the leadership of the working class. A democratic republic stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf.

Here is the physical power that provides both the ample carrot and stick needed to win a settlement in Israel-Palestine, that involves neither pogrom, conquest nor national oppression.

However, what many on the left regard as the holy grail - ie, a single, democratic Palestine which unites Arabs and Jews - is only achievable after mutual trust and respect has been established. After all, if it is to be democratic it will have to come through the voluntary agreement of the two peoples concerned. This, sadly, is not achievable at present - and unfortunately Tony appears to believe it never will be.

Pogrom
Pogrom

Emboldened BNP

The result of the BNP trial confirms the idiocy of relying on the state to deal with fascism. This court case has been absolutely the best thing that could happen to the BNP. It’s given them publicity money just can’t buy.

Unite Against Fascism have done their best to look like a bunch of do-gooders whilst allowing the BNP to portray themselves as the underdog. The results are what one would expect. Last week’s turnout outside Leeds crown court was very poor, with anti-fascists being outnumbered by flag-waving BNP supporters.

Emboldened, they go on the offensive. Last Saturday, UAF leafleters were attacked by the BNP in Morley. Get used to it - you’ve not seen anything yet. Anyone who thinks we can have a dialogue with fascism needs to pull their head out of the sand.

Only the strategy of mass mobilisation, based on the organised labour movement, can defeat the BNP.

Emboldened BNP

Degenerate

In response to Graeme Kemp’s letter November 9, well, gee, comrade Shac .... I mean, Kemp, as you “don’t think anything degenerate needs our support”, then to be consistent you must take this position towards the degenerate trade unions, whose misleaders constantly sell out their membership to the strategic interests of the bosses and their capitalist state.

Degenerate
Degenerate

Distorted

It does not help when people have a distorted view of reality, such as David Morgan, who appears to have a problem with prostitution.

The people who want to close down sex work, such as prostitution, are well-meaning, feminist-tinged bourgeois democrats. Ana Lopes said in her article in the Weekly Worker: “People get their ideas about what it means to be a sex worker through the media” - which sells extreme sensationalised stories to manipulate public opinion and divide the working class (October 19). She said prostitutes did not have a problem with the work they were doing: only its conditions. Lopes points to what Marx says: “Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the worker.” In capitalist society we are all prostitutes.

Working women can only gain equality by fighting alongside working men, not bourgeois women (and men, for that matter).

Distorted

Positive

I was unable to attend the November 11 founding meeting of the Campaign for a Marxist Party due to a chest infection, but the positive coverage of the conference by the Weekly Worker is encouraging. I agree with Tom May and Mike Macnair about the political potentialities and indeed necessity of the unity of Marxists in a period of disintegration and fragmentation.

It has been disheartening to observe Marxists who have not had the courage of their convictions to move forward to and take steps, however small, towards a Marxist party and greater principled unity. We should dismiss lurid suspicions about a CPGB takeover, when goodwill is required at the outset of the unity process.

I am in favour of pressing on and keeping the momentum going by discussing the draft programme of the CPGB at seminars. But if these CPGB seminars for those comrades who want to seriously pursue unity on a programmatic basis are to be held in London then they should be in a venue near Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston stations on a Saturday between 12 noon and 5pm to enable comrades who, like myself, work and live outside London and depend on public transport to attend.

Again we should dismiss vacuous and nostalgic rhetoric about the Socialist Alliance’s programme People before profit - which looked to an unrealistic restoration of the post-war settlement - embodying the highest level of unity in the post-World War II period. If there is any political rationality in such a statement, it is a misapplication of the political unity which led to the formation of the Communist Party in 1920. The comparison has no political substance.

I expect the CMP seminars or day schools to be held in Glasgow, Sheffield and Nottingham, as well as London. The discussion will probably revolve around the programmatic tradition of communism. I think we should leave aside labels. Comments from John Bridge about Trotskyism finding minimum-maximum programmes anathema are not really helpful.

It depends how you define minimum/maximum. Trotsky drew on Lenin, the Bolshevik tradition from 1917 and the early years of the Third International for his concept of ‘transitional’.

Lenin’s position was ambiguous in polemics with Kautsky about the constituent assembly. Did it mean the minimum programme was no longer relevant? The answer was yes and no.

Just to end on a critical note about the resolutions adopted at the CMP conference. On point 7 of the resolution 2 on ‘Founding principles’, “the maximum possible [party] democracy objective circumstances permit”, are weasel words. The CPGB does not aim for as much democracy and republicanism as circumstances allow. Its object is democracy and republicanism. There are no qualifications.

The programmatic norm should be that party democracy is not expendable or a luxury, but essential. The character of party democracy should be as specific as possible. And who decides on circumstances? Remember the banning of factions in the Bolshevik Party? It was a mistake despite the hostile circumstances.

Positive