Letters

Pub talk

VN Gelis needs to get his facts straight.

Either workers for the bus service work under a union contract or they do not. If they do, they are all paid the same. This is true in London, as it is true in New York, where more than 30,000 workers labour under the same wages as dictated by the general bargaining agreement. It should be worth noting that a huge percentage of these ‘union’ workers are also immigrants, as is the leader of the union itself.

The whole point of unions is to counteract the effects of an oversupply of labour in a capitalist society. That bosses are recruiting workers in other countries is directly proportionate to the degree of unionisation in any particular industry. The key, then, is to be sure that class-struggle, anti-racist leaders are elected. If not, it doesn’t matter what the supply of immigrant labour is - we will all lose.

Unions that are ‘effective’ are the ones that raise the banner of class struggle and internationalism, in as many languages as possible. VN Gelis’s gross nationalism is more fit for a skinhead pub than a forum for serious unionism.

Pub talk
Pub talk

Hungary 1956

The Weekly Worker usually comments on events of significance for the world struggle for socialism. However, in light of the recent 50th anniversary, the paper said not a word about the 1956 revolution of the Hungarian workers’ councils against the stranglehold of a bureaucratic state.

In November of that year, Soviet artillery bombarded Budapest and 15 Soviet divisions, backed by 6,000 tanks, marched into Hungary to crush the workers’ councils - instruments of self-liberation created by the workers themselves.

Some of the Soviet troops who were far easterners and hardly spoke Russian, let alone Magyar, thought they were in Berlin fighting a Nazi uprising. When they discovered the truth, some defected to the Hungarians, handing over their weapons. A resolution of the Budapest Revolutionary Council demanded that Soviet soldiers who fraternised be granted asylum in Hungary.

The effects of the Hungarian revolution were felt elsewhere in eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia there were demonstrations in Bratislava, Levice and other cities. In the German Democratic Republic there were riots, strikes and demonstrations. In Romania the army was disarmed, as workers and students held meetings of solidarity with Hungary. In the USSR itself railway workers refused to run military supplies to Hungary. Leningrad students marched on the Winter Palace with the slogan ‘Hands off Hungary’. The writer Alexi Dobrovolski was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for distributing uncensored reports of the uprising.

The uprising was sparked off by members of the AVO security police, supposed defenders of a workers’ state, opening fire on an unarmed demonstration. Their pay was three times that of a Hungarian worker or, in the case of officers, nine or even 12 times. They had access to the best housing, while many workers still lived in slums. After two weeks of bitter fighting 50,000 Hungarians were dead, but resistance continued in the form of strikes and demonstrations well into 1957. The state took its revenge with long terms of imprisonment and executions.

Despite the tales spun by the high priests of Stalinism, the Hungarian revolution was not a fascist counter-coup aimed at restoring private capitalism. It wanted genuine democratic socialism, workers’ self-management and power to be given to the workers’ councils. A third of the membership of the CPGB resigned in protest and half of the Young Communist League left. Sadly, Trotskyist groups such as the Socialist Labour League that benefited from a relative influx of CPGB members had an internal regime that was even worse than that of the CPGB. An undemocratic organisation cannot hope to create a democratic society.

Hungary 1956 therefore has much to teach us, but will today’s socialists try to learn the lessons?

Hungary 1956
Hungary 1956

Point of fact

The writer of the ‘No bans on christian fundamentalists’ article might want to be a little more sure of his facts (Weekly Worker November 23).

The motion to change the name of Exeter Christian Union to the Evangelical Christian Union is entirely separate from the motion to freeze its accounts and so on. In fact, I seconded the original first motion alongside another christian, whereas (as you note) I opposed the second.

I am curious to know what, in the article you mention, merits the title “incensed rightwinger”? And, furthermore, why do you assume that Brutus Green is not my real name? I found both equally amusing.

Point of fact

Hot air

Homeowners in the UK’s housing hot-air balloon have had it easy for a long time, safe in the knowledge that the value of where they lay their hat has been rising for a decade. Yet now it seems house prices have inflated so much, the first signs that the bubble will burst are emerging.

Since the last UK housing bubble popped in the early 1990s, house prices have nearly tripled, with the average price currently at £184,924. And it seems people have forgotten that dark period because they are still buying. However, a former adviser to Gordon Brown recently warned in a report that house price growth has been based on unrealistic expectations and “significant” falls in value are likely.

When his announcement was made, the shares of sub-prime house loan lender Kensington Group plummeted, making them the biggest losers in the FTSE350 that day. The company warned that profits would be at the lower end of City forecasts, while profit growth in 2007 would fall, due to ‘intense’ competition. Kensington lends to those with poor credit records. Yet it seems it may be tightening its policy.

Perhaps lenders are finally starting to come to their senses. The Financial Services Authority recently warned banks should now be planning for house prices to fall by 40%. In fact, Kensington is one of the first companies to announce they may hold back on their lending, which may mean others will follow suit. And when that happens, a collapse in prices is likely.

Hot air
Hot air

Whose parliament?

Nick Rogers (Weekly Worker November 23) and my Democratic Socialist Alliance comrade, Steve Wallis (Letters, December 14), will have to marshal some more convincing evidence to support their shared contention that what Rogers calls "the classic Trotskyist model of indirect democracy - workers elect their local factory committee, which then elects a district committee, which in turn elects a city-wide committee, all the way up to a supreme soviet" is "eminently open to bureaucratisation".

Nick can only cite the case of Cuba and speculate as to the fate that might befall a worker who raised the demand to recall Fidel Castro. Conveniently for his argument, he fails to mention that the workers' councils in Cuba have only a consultative status and are subordinate to a bureaucratic state with a leader cult. This is a serious omission, in light of the fact that his declared target is the clause in the CPGB's Draft programme which proposes: "Supreme power in the state [my emphasis] will be in workers' councils, composed of delegates who are elected and recallable at any time."

I would have thought it self-evident that bureaucratisation is more likely in workers' councils that have been powerless from the outset than in ones which exercise supreme power in the state following a working class revolution. Nick offers us nothing to support his assertion when applied to the latter scenario.

As for Steve, I think he shoots himself in the foot twice with his illustrations of his strong agreement with Nick: "Bureaucrats (of whom some may be potential ruthless dictators like Stalin) [may] rise up such a hierarchy" and then stay in power once they are there, and other such risers may include infiltrators on the side of the capitalist class, he suggests.

But Stalin did not reach his position as dictator and tyrant by moving up the hierarchy of soviets. He did so via a career path in a bureaucratised Bolshevik Party, following a devastating civil war. Likewise the notable example of a ruling class infiltrator in the Russian revolutionary movement, Malinovsky, did not rise through soviet structures, but was appointed by the party to lead the Bolshevik group in the duma, a pseudo-parliamentary structure. Slightly ironic, I think, in view of Steve's (and Nick's) expressions of preference for laying hold of and reforming the parliamentary institutions bequeathed by capitalism.

Interestingly, Steve goes on to describe the practical difficulties that could exist in trying to exercise instant recallability over representatives elected to a parliament by proportional representation. He makes some valid points. However, there is no such difficulty, as the CPGB Draft programme recognises, in building in the principle of instant recallability to a constitution based upon workers' councils.

The DSA's current draft programme, People before profit, describes socialism as "the working class organising to liberate itself from the rule of profit and creat[ing] its own democracy, abolishing the privileges of managers and officials". We do not restrict ourselves to a perspective of laying hold of and reforming what capital has created.

The best guard against bureaucratisation is that the working class remains engaged with those democratic institutions it has itself created. Of crucial importance here is a point that Mike Macnair has emphasised: the need for socialisation of information. Steve too recognises this point, when he comments on the danger that only committee members truly know how other committee members behave. The most meticulous reporting of the proceedings of workers' councils is essential to overcome this and other problems and here our class' daily newspapers are crucially important.

Finally, none of my arguments contradict Steve's emphasis on the importance of pursuing democratic demands in relation to bourgeois parliaments - PR, annual parliaments and the principle of elected representatives receiving no more than an average worker's wage are some of the most important of these demands. The fight for these demands is vital in training our class to become the ruling class.

What is seriously mistaken though is for revolutionaries to insist that such reformed parliaments must be the instrument of the class' self liberation. In doing this, they contradict the very concept of self-liberation.

Whose parliament?
Whose parliament?

New recruit

“A substantial majority of the population will have to be in favour of socialism - it cannot be established on the basis of 51% support,” writes Hillel Ticktin. “The working class as a whole - white collar and blue collar - must support it. There has to be a genuine intellectual shift whereby most people conceive of the superiority of socialism” (‘No more historical abortions’, December 14).

Compare that with: “If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least 500 years” (Lenin, from a speech in November 1918, quoted by John Reed in Ten days that shook the world).

Surprisingly, it seems as if Hillel Ticktin once again takes on the mantle of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its oft-criticised advocacy of the necessity for the majority of the working class to understand and desire socialism against the Leninist model of the vanguard party and the belief that the working class can only achieve “trade union consciousness” (What is to be done?).

New recruit
New recruit

Obnoxious

Sussex Action for Peace (SAFP) is a long-standing anti-war/peace group based in Brighton. It has long been a target for takeover by the Socialist Workers Party. In recent months the SWP has come to see the group as little more than a wing of the Stop the War Coalition. Previously, having failed to take it over, the SWP set up its own Hove Action for Peace, before drifting back into SAFP.

The behaviour of the SWP towards SAFP embodies everything that is worst in its sectarian approach. Rather than genuinely working with others whose political perspectives differ, they do their best merely to get whatever group they work in to become a front for their own undemocratic politics.

Problems in SAFP began after a march against the Lebanon war in August. The police, under the pretext they had not been notified of the march (they had!) and because of an alleged attack on someone who had shouted out “Terrorist!” at a previous demonstration (strange the police refused to take witness statements from anyone), classified the march as a racial incident and set about harassing, videoing and attacking marchers, especially those who looked Arab or muslim.

After the march a vigorous campaign was launched under the title, ‘The right to demonstrate is not a police privilege’. A large public meeting of nearly 100 people heard a variety of speakers, including two local councillors, denounce the police’s attempts to harass anti-war demonstrations, including the long-standing campaign against arms manufacturer EDO-MBM.

You might have thought that the SWP would have been enthusiastic about the campaign. After all, the ‘war on terror’ has involved a bonfire of civil liberties, habeas corpus, control orders, etc. But, no, the SWP was more interested in ‘islamophobia’, since targeting muslims is an essential part of Respect’s electoral project. Their key organiser in SAFP, Manus, argued that we should have a quick meeting with the police to sort out any problems and “move on”. This we were not prepared to do, so Manus, taking advantage of the fact that there were problems with the email list, decided to create his own list, excluding myself and others who were deemed “obnoxious”.

Unfortunately for the SWP, we managed to gain access to all the emails, with the result that Manus was left with egg on his face. When I first got wind of what was up - namely an email sent to selected members of SAFP - I circulated the following email titled ‘Divide and rule’ as bait to Manus’s new group on December 8: “I could have sworn that we were members of SAFP, yet we seem to have been missed out of this mailing.”

In reply I got a post entitled ‘Divide and rule - that’s crap’ from Manus, ‘explaining’ the situation: “Hi. I didn’t have your individual email, but it’s not an official email (SAFP) group anyway - these are people I’ve worked with before on a fraternal basis, that’s all.”

Clearly Manus, in accordance with SWP practice, has no problem in lying to those he works with if they disagree with his perspectives. What he didn’t know was that we were already in possession of an email of his to another comrade, giving his real reasons for having excluded us from his new mailing list.

The comrade had written to Manus stating: “… I’ve copied some email addresses that should be added on to the new email group. I’ll leave it to your discretion, though I’m sure they were not omitted intentionally …”

To which Manus replied: “To be honest with you, Tony and G seem to oppose most things I propose and do, so I don’t see why I should work with them - plus they’re obnoxious with it. Who needs enemies when you have friends like these? The new group I drew up was based on people who I have cooperated with fraternally. It’s actually not a proper e-group - we’ve yet to sort out the old lists. As for I, well he started off willing to work in SAFP … More recently he’s just been narky at SAFP meetings.”

That seems obvious enough. We are “obnoxious” and I is “narky” for having disagreed with the SWP!

Maybe the moral of the story is that if you are going to lie and deceive don’t broadcast your intentions in advance!

Obnoxious
Obnoxious

Solidarity motions

The following motion was moved in the Scottish parliament by Rosemary Byrne MSP:

“That the parliament believes that the Royal Regiment of Scotland should use the highest quality woollen cloth for its tartan; is concerned that there is a shortage of kilts for the army at present; notes that EU rules insist on competitive international tendering for the supply of goods worth more than £300,000 which could result in the cheapest and most inferior product being chosen, and calls on the ministry of defence to announce when the trialling of kilts for the Royal Regiment will end and to ensure that every consideration is given to the contract to supply kilts to the Royal Regiment of Scotland being kept in Scotland.”

Whilst the following was lodged by Tommy Sheridan MSP:

“That the parliament notes with concern that London Underground ticket kiosk machines do not accept Scottish banknotes; notes that ticket machines can be reprogrammed to accept Scottish banknotes, as the parliament has done with its own cashless vending service, and calls on London Underground to reprogramme its ticketing machines to accept Scottish banknotes.”

Very internationalist in outlook - I don’t think. Petty nationalist populism is not the same as workers’ republicanism, but then Solidarity isn’t the Scottish Socialist Party. Wonder what the Socialist Workers Party thinks of this tosh?

Solidarity motions

Solidarity-SSP

In response to the letter from Bill Scott with regard to the SSP-Solidarity dispute over parliamentary staffing arrangements (December 14), Solidarity MSPs Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne wish to make clear the following points:

1. This is not an official National Union of Journalists dispute: it is a problem with staffing which the NUJ Scottish organiser is attempting to resolve.

2. Throughout this period we have kept the NUJ fully informed and we have cooperated fully with Paul Holleran, the NUJ Scottish organiser, in his attempt to save the jobs of SSP staff, as he will testify.

3. We wish to place on record that we do not accept any blame for the staffing crisis being faced by the SSP. When we split from the SSP in September, we took two out of the four staff we were entitled to take with us, and offered to employ and redeploy two more. Had this offer been accepted, as the Scottish parliament advised, there would be no SSP staff crisis. However, the offer was rejected and the SSP are asking us to continue to contribute to pay for a staff complement for six MSPs for the four remaining SSP MSPs.

This is contrary to the parliamentary rules and the parliament has made clear it will not pay for staff who do not work for members. Indeed the parliament advised the SSP that if they rejected our offer they should take some other action to prevent job losses. The SSP parliamentary group failed to do this and instead they have allowed a crisis to be created by their inaction.

4. This ongoing situation has meant that we have had to manage with only three full-time staff instead of the four we are entitled to, while the SSP retain a staff complement for six MSPs with only four members.

5. The SSP accuse us of creating this crisis. However, we believe it is of their own making. Indeed rather than having removed money from the wages pool, as claimed by the SSP, we are entitled to £6,000 for research that was paid to the SSP. To date we have not received any of that money.

6. Furthermore, we have been more than generous, in, for example, contributing to the SSP staff costs for the whole of September despite getting no service from them. This we treated as a period of notice.

7. We have also continued to pay half our salaries to repay a loan taken out to buy the SSP HQ (which they have just sold): that is, £2,600 a month - a total of over £15,000 since we were no longer members of the SSP.

Solidarity-SSP
Solidarity-SSP

No position

I would like to clarify a point made regarding the ‘dispute’ involving the SSP’s parliamentary workers.

There has been no ‘position’ or statement from Rosemary Byrne on this issue on the Solidarity website. There has never been a press release from Rosemary Byrne stating that she was negotiating on behalf of Solidarity.

As for money owed to Hugh Kerr by the SSP, this is a private matter for the SSP to resolve and not related to the dispute.

No position
No position

No alternative

John Wight’s claims about the former Yugoslavia amaze me. So Yugoslavia gave its people the “highest level of social and economic justice”? Apparently this came about because most of industry and agriculture was state-owned.

Did John ever visit this ‘communist’ state, when it existed? I did and I cannot say I was impressed by the condition of many buildings or even supermarkets. They were second-rate, to be honest.

This state perverted the idea of ‘self-management’ by workers. It had to export its unemployment through emigration. It was also rather difficult for ordinary people to change their government - the Communist Party wouldn’t let them.

Yugoslavia was not a shining and dynamic economy, although the Slovenian bit did okay. Why did it do better? Because it was the part the least like the rest of the country.

I can assure John that Yugoslavia was not broken up because it provided a good alternative to capitalism or social democracy.

No alternative

Oil war

The air war over Kosovo was primarily a struggle for control of the potential profit bonanza from oil in the Caspian Sea region. On a shaky, temporary basis, it united the imperialists of western Europe and their US rivals against Milosevic. Competing factions of the US ruling class, fresh from their Clinton impeachment brawl, also briefly got together to swat him down.

In neither case did this unity last. US imperialism may have shown that it can still literally get away with murder in defence of its profit interests. It continues to dominate the international scene. On the other hand, the latest Balkan war also sharpened every major contradiction in the world and deepened the main splits among US bosses. It settled nothing. On the contrary, far wider and bloodier oil wars are on the cards, and a brutal struggle is brewing among factions of US rulers over control of state power.

The air war over Kosovo shows how much violence the rulers will use to secure even a secondary oil source. Both sides slaughtered workers by the thousands and made hundreds of thousands jobless and homeless. Worse yet will be the after-effects of Nato’s ‘humanitarian’ genocide in the years to come. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav workers, including the unborn, are now at risk from diseases due to bombing-related pollution.

The life-and-death struggle to monopolise energy resources, particularly oil, lies at the heart of inter-imperialist rivalry. Oil remains the lifeblood of modern imperialist industry. Any given imperialist’s dream of superpower status requires control of oil at every stage - discovery, pumping, refining, transporting and marketing.

The biggest US oil firms are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron and Texaco. These descendants of the Rockefeller Standard Oil empire depend largely on Middle Eastern supplies, which make up two-thirds of the world’s known trillion-barrel reserves. The Rockefeller interests want US foreign policy and military doctrine focused on the defence of this treasure.

However, the Rockefeller companies can no longer dictate as absolutely as they once did. The race for Caspian oil provides a case in point. When the Soviet Union broke up in the 1990s, Rockefeller competitors began a stampede for alternate sources near and beneath the Caspian Sea. Leading the charge were British Petroleum and Amoco (which merged in 1998) and the Russian giant, Lukoil. However, getting oil from the Caspian to market isn’t easy. The Caspian is landlocked, and therefore oil companies and governments have woven a tangled web of competing pipelines.

The Balkans are crucial to these pipelines because oil destined for western Europe must pass through them at one point or another. In early 1997, BP and the Texas Halliburton Company proposed a pipeline that would go from Burgas in Bulgaria through Skopje in Macedonia (15 miles from Kosovo) to Vlore, a port in Albania. It was to carry 750,00 barrels of BP Amoco crude to European Union markets.

The Rockefeller oil moguls consider the Balkans strategic for different reasons. Exxon-Mobil has no pipelines of its own there. But it certainly don’t want to lose the rich European market to BP Amoco or anyone else. The moguls therefore have a strategic stake in Caspian-related developments. Geography also makes the Balkan region a key stepping-stone to the Rockefeller Middle Eastern interests. So the main wing of US bosses has an interest in keeping Balkan countries divided, weak and pro-US. The first Rockefeller plan for the former Yugoslavia set up its provinces in the early 1990s as ‘autonomous’ regions and put local tyrants in charge of each.

The Rockefellers actually considered Milosevic a potential US ally at the time. Rockefeller agent Cyrus Vance headed the consortium that imported Yugo cars into the US. But the Yugo turned out to be a lemon, and, from the standpoint of Exxon and its competitors, Milosevic proved no more reliable than his car.

Sure, Milosevic was a butcher. He committed many acts of violence against Yugoslav workers in defence of his own profit interests. But US and other Nato bosses hardly cared about that. The initial break-up of the former Yugoslavia was accompanied by a brutal wave of racist expulsions, in which Croatian fascists, backed by US and German imperialists, drove out hundreds of thousands of Serbian workers, killing thousands.

From western bosses’ standpoint, Milosevic’s true offence was hardly a second-rate genocide campaign. After all, nobody takes a back seat historically to US and German imperialism in the matter of mass murder. Nato identified Milosevic as a criminal for one predominant reason: he was trying to grab a piece of the pipeline action and steal a big share of Caspian oil wealth for himself and his clique in Belgrade.

Oil war
Oil war