Letters

Hero

I say to all those who are trying to have it both ways on the coming confrontation between the degenerate capitalist state that is the US and the forces of the emerging world represented by Iran: president Ahmadinejad is the greatest anti-imperialist leader in the Middle East today, which is why he was embraced by that Latin American hero, Hugo Chávez.

Admittedly there is not much to choose from among the rest of the Middle East rulers, though. Talebani will perhaps satisfy only those renegades of the Hitchens persuasion.

Hero

Wishful thinking

Having looked through the CPGB’s Draft programme, I wish the communists in Ireland thought like you. Here they make deals with government.

Wishful thinking

Correction

The editors would like to point out that the piece entitled ‘Mobilise the dispossessed’ published in Weekly Worker February 22 was an edited version of the talk given by comrade Mehdi Kia at Communist University 2006.

The talk was entirely based on research done by Ardeshir Mehrdad - co-editor of Iran Bulletin - Middle East Forum. Comrade Mehrdad had previously presented the core of this research in two four-hour talks to the 2006 Socialist Forum.

Please note that the article must not be reproduced in whole or in part. The Weekly Worker would like to apologise for this error in presentation.

Correction
Correction

Old versus new

I have to thank Dave Craig from the Revolutionary Democratic Group for setting the record straight over the preposterous ‘young Trotsky’ versus ‘old Trotsky’ views on revolution (Letters, March 8).

What people forget, Trotskyists especially, is that most of Trotsky’s writings were completely Russia-oriented. The same was true of Lenin’s writings on the topic. They were not writing about China or Africa or the US. They were trying to develop a programme for the workers of Russia.

The ‘old Trotsky’ or ‘later Trotsky’ was now a major player in the Communist International, an international facing world revolution or what looked like it - something no-one in 1903 or 1907 had contemplated in this way before.

Secondly, all of our multiple Trotskys understood, generally, the importance of the democratic revolution and democratic demands - something else our latter-day Bolsheviks often forget. That a revolution starts a democratic one and grows over into a socialist one means fighting for the democratic revolution as the best fighters for democratic demands.

It does not mean prancing around the park with signs that say ‘National liberation through socialist revolution’. If you do, you just don’t get it.

Old versus new
Old versus new

Democracy

Marx said that “democracy is the route to socialism”. But in this case Marx was not talking about bourgeois or feudal democracy. Marx confirmed socialist democracy.

Today the common people and workers of Britain have bourgeois democracy or anti-socialist, pro-capitalist, reactionary democracy. In this democracy the prime minister of a capitalist state, the agent of capitalism, does not care or value parliament or the needs of the common people. Bourgeois democracy always protects capitalists’ interests and helps them to oppress the poor. Under bourgeois democracy, parliamentary institutions are the weapons used by capitalists to oppress workers, to attack and control weak countries. Today the agents of capitalists like Bush and Blair use the weapons properly for their interests. They don’t feel shame.

However, I think the workers of Britain should reject parliamentary bourgeois democracy immediately and fight for a socialist democratic constitution.

And, yes, I must support the six provisional proposals for the establishment of a democratic, secular republic (‘Charter for a democratic republic’, March 8). It would at least be better than the present bourgeois ruling system.

Democracy
Democracy

Labour’s ghost

George Galloway’s came to Swansea University on March 13 to rally support for Respect’s Welsh assembly May 3 election campaign. The audience of approximately 150 people, at least half of whom were students and presumably had not heard him speak before, received his usual exposé of the Blair-Bush hypocrisy and record over the Gulf war with some enthusiasm.

There were more references to god than I had previously heard in his speeches - many in the audience were muslims. But the references were more than just figures of speech - they had an inspirational resonance to them. Indeed, Galloway concluded that he’d use his “last breath that god gives me to fight against Blair”.

Then there was his Labourism: “I am not a Marxist, a communist or a Trotskyite,” he proclaimed. “I’m just Labour”. Proudly announcing his honorary membership of the Mardy miners lodge, he spoke of Labour’s “strong track record” in south Wales over the past 100 years and how it had now “sold out” the working class in the Rhondda. Respect was the “ghost of Labour’s past”, Galloway insisted.

He also spoke of the need to get rid of capitalism, but the clear conclusion to draw from the meeting was that a ‘genuine’ Labour Party and nothing else was the answer with which to lead the country away from the evil of that political system.

Labour’s ghost
Labour’s ghost

Like Lansbury

A reader of Socialist Worker could easily come to the conclusion that Tower Hamlets Respect is the advanced guard of John Rees’s imagined ‘bridgehead’ to a socialist future. For example, in its report on the 2007-08 council budget, it says that “a combination of campaigning on the ground and pressure from the council’s Respect-led opposition” stopped the budget being agreed.

This is far from the truth. Yes, one weekend Respect councillors did campaign on the streets. Meanwhile, SWPers were stretched. On the same day there was Stop the War leafleting and regular Saturday paper sales.

At the council meeting it was the energetic lead member of the Conservative group who made the most interventions, presented an alternative budget and managed to stop and force the abandonment of the meeting. But this was not a ‘bridgehead’ and neither was it Respect’s ‘Poplar’ moment, as some appear to think.

A recent Bookmarks publication, being pushed by the SWP, leads us to believe that in Tower Hamlets Respect there resides the echo of the rebel Poplar councillor, George Lansbury. Lansbury and his councillors, we are told, led a militant, fighting campaign, defended the interests of those who elected them and posed the same questions in the East End that Respect is posing now.

The problem is the role of its councillors and their accountability to their members. Unlike Lansbury, the Respect councillors have no affinity with the working class and cannot bring any pressure to bear on the ultra-Blairites of the New Labour-controlled Tower Hamlets council, who are too busy proving their credentials for the coming Labour selection process to challenge Galloway.

Like Lansbury

Consumer arousal

Steve Cooke claims that John Adams’s music is not pro-capitalist because the composer’s opera, The death of Klinghoffer, was described as anti-American (Letters, March 1).

But this analysis fails to grasp how provocative and confrontational themes such as these are beneficial to the successful circulation of cultural artefacts in the cultural market. They constitute the primary tool of consumer arousal and stimulation for both cultural producers and their promotional agents, as that annual marketing fest, the Turner prize, amply illustrates. Adams’s ‘On the transmigration of souls’ amply illustrates this tendency, as does the inclusion of oral sex scenes in Thomas Adès’s opera Powder her face.

Thus, John Adams’s music is pro-capitalist because it contributes to processes of marketisation and commodification, in which aesthetic content becomes co-extensive with - or subordinate to - promotional message. In this context, the specifics of a given work’s dramatic or political complexion are only relevant to the extent that they offer no barrier to the successful reproduction and expansion of market-centric culture. Like many other contemporary neo-conservative composers, Adams’s work offers no such barrier.

Since the completion of his opera, John Adams has proceeded to enjoy all the symbolic and financial rewards that the American cultural and political establishment can confer. Is Steve Cooke really suggesting that genuine anti-Americanism would be rewarded in this way?

He further suggests that my position is “reductionist”. If by this he means that I am acknowledging the extent to which capital permeates all spheres of human endeavour and that we should resist any temptation to consider cultural producers somehow exempt from such processes, then I agree that the position is reductionist.

Consumer arousal
Consumer arousal

Blood-sucking

Graeme Kemp asks how much property a genuine socialist should own (Letters, March 8). He was responding to my letter pointing out that ‘comrade’ Michael Meacher and his wife own up to 12 properties worth in their entirety more that £5 million. Apparently, they have mortgages on at least four of them.

To answer Mr Kemp’s question, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a socialist having private wealth. Tony Benn springs to mind. However, when a socialist is elected as an MP there is clearly a conflict of interest when that person owns property which he or she rents out.

There is an incentive for MPs, socialist or otherwise, to oppose the building of new homes, whether they are private or council properties. By keeping down the supply of properties to rent or buy, MPs through the laws of supply and demand can see their property portfolios increase dramatically in value.

In times of trouble, mass hysteria will always seek scapegoats. One of the first has always been what is described as the ‘blood-sucking landlord’. Communists should therefore be at the forefront of the public demonisation of the private landlord, by calling for the introduction of rent controls. This should include the right of local authority rent officers to be able to force private landlords to charge a fair rent.

Capital and rental values would plunge accordingly. If this leads to a few MPs losing their property empires, so be it.

Blood-sucking
Blood-sucking

PCSU split vote

In response to Eddie Ford’s article on the Public and Commercial Services Union, I too was disappointed to see the PCSU accept a two-tier pension scheme for civil servants (‘Freudian slips and punishing the poor’, March 8).

Our general secretary, Mark Serwotka, had done so much to try and get other unions on board - from PCSU members taking lone strike action on November 5 2004 to achieving united action with other unions won for March 2005, but called off when the government offered talks. It went quiet for months then suddenly the two-tier system was announced.

I can state that members in my branch did express the view used as an excuse for settling - that they would not be prepared to fight for future workers’ rights. However, this was their view without any counter-argument being put out by the union. There was no actual campaign to win action to fight against a two-tier system, so no-one can really say whether members would or would not have fought. I feel we should have carried on.

Despite speaking to some NEC members, I can find no good reason as to why they agreed to settle other than the seemingly compelling pitch made by Mark. I do not know why he did not hold a series of regional meetings beforehand with branch activists to discuss the government’s offer and see what the NEC should do. Why the almighty rush to settle? I’m still left wondering.

Now for comrade Lee Rock (leading light in Socialist Caucus, CPGB member and secretary of the brand new PCS Independent Left) and his adventure of standing a complete Independent Left slate for the NEC, which is seemingly endorsed by Eddie Ford.

So confident of the rightness of his actions is Lee that he has still not given me the courtesy of a reply to my dissenting emails to him and to the Socialist Caucus website, much less a justification of his actions, despite divisions within Socialist Caucus. He has subsequently found time to write another article for Weekly Worker so he must still be alive! So allow me to try again.

Analysis of the 2006 NEC elections clearly shows that, despite the fact that Left Unity’s ‘Democracy Alliance’ candidates got over 110 branch nominations, compared to the right wing’s ‘4 the members’ six (yes, just six!), the right were just 2,000 votes away from getting many more NEC seats than the two or three they have. Comrade Rock boasts of getting 20 branch nominations for his Independent Left slate.

So, although I could be wrong, it is very reasonable to assume Lee’s adventure will simply split the left vote, allowing the right to regain control of the NEC. Where then will there be any campaign to fight job losses and privatisation?

I offered a real, realistic alternative to Lee. I suggested he allow Left Unity’s current NEC members (approximately 17) onto his slate, but replace the 13 or so ‘PCS Democrats’ on the NEC with the best 13 from his Independent Left comrades. If that fuller left slate had won (unarguably more likely than Lee’s completely separate slate adventure), he would therefore have been seen to keep the left in power (by not splitting the left vote) but removing the PCS Democrat opportunists in favour of getting even more lefts (ie, non-Socialist Party-sanctioned) onto the NEC.

That would have reduced the stifling domination by the SP, would have given his candidates a mandate to argue their programme should be that of the PCSU, and would have given Lee more bargaining power in the 2008 NEC elections.

His adventure isn’t supported by many in Socialist Caucus, nor many people they frantically contacted to stand (including myself!). None of the left independents that I have spoken to were hostile to my strategy, nor found any flaws with it.

The tragedy is that many activists are finally coming round to Lee’s preferred industrial action strategy (losing at conference time and time again, but this May might have been different), including me. However, if he pursues his reckless adventure, splits the left vote and hands control of the NEC back to the right he and his group will become social pariahs and his strategies will be defeated again. There will be massive demoralisation among the very activists Lee says he is supporting.

The Weekly Worker has been full of correct analysis of the futility of constant left splits for council and other elections (eg, Scottish Socialist Party v Solidarity), so why is it any different for union elections?

Despite Lee’s ignoring my emails and previous letter in the Weekly Worker he can still save the situation. He could reconvene the Socialist Caucus/Independent Left forum to discuss my suggestions (did he even copy my suggestion to his contacts?). If they agreed to it, they could decide which Independent Left NEC candidates withdraw their nominations.

If that combined left slate won, his standing and political platform would be high. If it lost, no real harm done and he can continue to argue his industrial strategy at PCSU conference in May.

Lee’s uncomradely behaviour towards me in ignoring my emails matches what he says the SP do towards him and his groupings! Lee does not seem to welcome dissent and politically sound, constructive criticisms. Maybe now he will pen a reply (but can he actually deal with my main points and not just reiterate his attacks on the current NEC - some of which I share?).

PCSU split vote
PCSU split vote

Revo and WP

One would have hoped that the acrimonious split between Workers Power and Permanent Revolution would not have damaged those who supported neither side but who want a truly independent revolutionary youth movement.

It was expected that, since Workers Power control the Revo site, the supporters of Permanent Revolution would have been culled, but those of us who defended the independence of Revo from Workers Power have recently been under attack ourselves in a way that makes the Socialist Workers Party look like the birthplace of democratic faction rights.

After calling for a bill of rights to protect posters from an almost Cannonite fixation with discipline, several of us have been banned and others warned that they will follow. As a school student who set up a Stop the War group in my college - despite there being a heavy Territorial Army presence - and is involved in campaigning for youth facilities and a skateboard park in my area, I would have thought that struggle unites. Instead it seems that if you are active and want to build a genuine, independent, socialist youth group you are not allowed to use the website of the independent socialist youth group called Revo.

Suffice to say that we have now resigned and will be holding talks with a view to either establishing ourselves as an external faction of Revo or start a campaign for a new independent youth movement.

Revo and WP

Quite impressive

I suppose the results of the University of Sheffield student union elections are quite impressive (‘Uphill battle’, March 8).

Did Communist Students stand anywhere else? I seem to recall large recruitment figures quoted last autumn in Leeds and Manchester.

Quite impressive

Youth ‘reform’

Since Thatcher and Blair, the word ‘reform’ has taken on its opposite meaning. Time was when it meant an improvement; now it invariably means the prelude to a worsening of the situation.

Blair’s forthcoming ‘reforms’ for 16-19-year-olds are a case in point. Actually the implications for civil liberties are quite horrendous, but, buried under double-speak, I have yet to hear any word of protest from anywhere.

Essentially it will mean forcing young adults to stay at school until they are almost 19. It means the abolition of the most fundamental human and civil rights for all those in this category. They will no longer have the right to leave school and make their own way in the world, as they see fit. By any clear view, this is conscription - no more, no less.

A high ratio of 16-year-olds can’t wait to leave school and enforced ‘childhood’ behind, and start work or living their own lives. Many of their colleagues who actually want to be at school and are interested in study can’t wait for them to leave either. Freeing the captive adolescents, many of whom who have bitterly resented the imposition of school discipline, makes for a much saner environment for those who want to be there.

How will this impact on the fact that 16-year-olds have the legal right to marry and have children? Get married and have a family, but we’ll lock you up if you don’t go to school? Still worse, lock up your parents because the married offspring with a family have finished school and want to live their own lives?

I suspect that this is a stalking horse for a further repression of rights enjoyed by under-18s. First it was smoking prohibition, now it’s leaving school. Who would bet it won’t be the age of consent next? That would fit into the total Blair trajectory of Americanising the British legal system and copying their laws and outlook. Watch out for the age at which you can buy alcohol going up to 21 or higher.

I would have thought the CPGB’s youth and student organisation would have launched a major national campaign on this issue - or don’t they think it is important enough?

Youth ‘reform’

Resources

I very much liked your interview with John Bellamy Foster (Weekly Worker November 10 2005). He is the only one today speaking such things on a Marxist scale.

Granted, there are comrades who do care about the environment, but one of the main problems of the socialist and environmental movements is the lack of a cohesive environmental programme, setting out the necessity of a dramatic change in society. Using organic shampoo or buying hemp can help, but is not useful to the vast majority of people and, as Bellamy Foster says, without the necessary change it is all worthless.

The Communist League is currently discussing such problems and we are glad to have resources such as these.

Resources
Resources

The right thing

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last month was not only a conservative compromise, but substantially watered down. Before public release, government officials cut and deleted references to the feedback effects of global warming (see New Scientist March 8). It appears that after the last report, in 2001, ‘on-message’ bureaucrats were moved into key positions of the IPCC structure so as to steer and produce a report that was favourable to business-as-usual ideologues.

Having lost the argument on the science of climate change, the capitalists’ new tactic is to deny the accelerated feedback. An example of their solution can be seen in George Bush’s agreement with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. This will mean that huge swathes of the Amazon rainforest will be cut down, to be replaced by sugar cane plantations, so as to create a worldwide market in ethanol, a petrol substitute for the car industry.

The state will not provide an answer, as proved by New Labour’s abysmal record. Despite the anticipated Climate Change Bill, proposing an ambitious 60% cut in emissions of carbon dioxide by 2050, the call will be on households and individuals to provide the solutions. These will be market-orientated in the form of carbon credits, carbon taxes and tax breaks.

The capitalist will produce the goods and it will be up to us to buy the latest light-emitting diodes. As chancellor Brown says, “I know the British people want to do the right thing.”

The right thing
The right thing

Only one tactic

If Benjamin Klein really wants to “win the battle of ideas” with the British National Party he should start by investing in a couple of baseball bats.

He tells us: “The term ‘fascism’ is not something that should be thrown around willy-nilly”, which is true (Communist Student February). But he then goes on to define fascism in such a way that it almost cannot exist outside a revolutionary period. It “broadly represents the victory of counterrevolution in a revolutionary period”. Yes, that’s the victory of fascism, but how does it build and grow? - through organisations like the BNP.

For Benjamin there are now “no fighting squads” and no “mobilising of the disillusioned” to prevent the working class taking power. That’s all right then - we can sleep safely in our beds!

Perhaps Benjamin has not heard of the Merseyside Trades Council president slashed in the face recently, the thug who shot two black people in London, declaring to the police he supported the BNP and wanted to kill all blacks, the BNP members in court recently with explosives and chemicals preparing for a race war, the threats made only last week against anti-fascists in Leeds. Perhaps he has not noticed the BNP mobilising the “disillusioned” and dispossessed in Blair’s Britain against the muslims and the Poles?

No, Benjamin is deeply impressed by the BNP’s swapping of “boots for suits”. Clearly he has never seen the pictures of Adolf Hitler arriving to be sworn in as elected chancellor wearing his best suit. The BNP has not changed its spots just because it has changed its clobber; at its centre remains its fascist leadership and its fascist thugs. Benjamin is in fact fooled by Nick Griffin’s electoral turn: he has swallowed hook, line and sinker Griffin’s media campaign that the BNP is now a respectable, populist racist party.

What should we do, Benjamin asks, if an officer of the student union suddenly declared him or herself a BNP member? Drive them from office and off the campus. It was done before with National Front student leader Patrick Harrington at North London Polytechnic in the early 1980s - student leaders were even jailed for picketing against him. Nevertheless Harrington was forced into an annexe to have lectures on his own, a fascist pariah driven out of the student body. Clearly Benjamin Klein does not know the successful history of anti-fascist struggles - and they don’t involve ‘debating’ enforced repatriation, the destruction of trade unions and fascist dictatorship with the likes of Nick Griffin.

Clearly he does not know his party’s own history either. He declares that in 1936 “the Communist Party, with all its defects, was able to mobilise working people in the East End to stop Oswald Mosley”. In fact the British CP leadership, pursuing the popular front line, initially fought against the mobilisation to stop the fascists at Cable Street.

This demonstration to confront and stop the fascists was organised by rank and file communists, the Independent Labour Party and the local Jewish community against the opposition of the leadership. It was only 24 hours before, when they knew they had been defeated in their efforts to stop the confrontation, that the CP’s executive changed their line and supported it (read Joe Jacobs’ Out of the ghetto).

Benjamin Klein stands in this tradition, fighting to prevent confrontation, to debate the fascists - the tradition of Stalin’s reformist communist parties - rather than ‘show them the pavement’. And on this question so, it appears, does the CPGB.

Only one tactic
Only one tactic