Letters

Beam me up

It is strange for a communist to disparage materialism, as Steve Wallis did last week (Letters, September 13). Actually it is the other way round. It is idealism that leaves no room for free will, because god is all-powerful, all-knowing and decides everything. Or so the Calvinists tell us.

Materialism, on the other hand, is based on chance and contingency. Nothing can be definitely foretold. People often have little control over their circumstances (chance), but, depending on circumstances (contingency), we almost always have choices.

Materialists are basically unconcerned with the existence or non-existence of god. We take the view that the universe (of which we are a tiny part) has its own laws and that these laws can be discovered through scientific endeavour, thus increasing the scope for sensible choice, based on understanding.

Artistically everyone has soul, or spiritual feelings - the common, palpable, material experiences of all humans. Soul and spirituality, in the materialist sense, have everything to do with life and nothing to do with death everlasting.

On the question of whether going from 2 to -2 and back to 2 again is an example of the negation of the negation or not, let’s assume it is you (rather than an abstraction) that goes from being yourself to the exact physical opposite of yourself and back to yourself again. You would have gone through a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ type experience. Wouldn’t you be in a different place at a different time and would you really be exactly the same as before?

In nature matter passes through this kind of experience all the time and it is certainly part of the process of historical development.

Beam me up
Beam me up

Little Herberts

Terry Liddle writes: “What is needed is a disciplined, uniformed youth movement that will act as a proletarian self-defence force and defend working class communities against lumpen anti-social scum, criminals, drug pushers and fascists” (Letters, September 13).

Is comrade Liddle serious? What does he propose to call it - the ‘Liddle Youth’? Are you sure you’re writing to the right paper? Someone give him the Daily Mail’s address. This argument is the Marxist equivalent of the ‘bring back national service and hang ’em’ brigade.

An elitist bunch of morally superior little Herberts telling me what to do with my life? Have the communists learnt nothing from the 20th century?

Working class morality, if there has to be such a wretched thing, must surely start from the point that it is immoral to make judgements about other people because they use or abuse alcohol, or because they want to go trainspotting or whatever it takes for them to define their life.

Tommy Teutel

Little Herberts

Hug a hoodie

There is much that I agree with in Terry Liddle’s letter. I too am in favour of arming the working class and agree that such units will need a moral élan and self-discipline to carry out their tasks, but I also detect a fondness for puritanical high-mindedness in his approach.

People are entitled to relax and enjoy themselves. To put themselves first at times. None of us is perfect - all of us make mistakes, do silly things, create noise and are a nuisance on occasion. Let him who is perfect cast the first stone. In self-confident working class communities even in today’s social conditions people do not normally pee in the lifts and those that do are too drunk to know what they are doing.

If this is the result of youthful exuberance and not malevolence I would counsel tolerance and leave it to the hangover to teach the lesson rather than the actions of the militia. We do not want to put reliance on policing, but encourage an atmosphere of friendliness and sociability to teach self-discipline from within, not bash it in from without.

Shopkeepers may sell strong lager for profit, but young people buy it to have a good time, not to upset their neighbours. The sad thing is that often there isn’t much else to do, and getting drunk is the only pleasure they can afford, and I assure you, speaking from experience, it is a pleasure. The answer, again, is not in policing, but in fighting for young people to have more opportunities in life. Teaching young people how to live their lives is not a job for the militia but for all organisations of the working class.

Hug a hoodie

Harassment

The owner of the Surrey site where the Gatwick No Border Camp was supposed to take place this week has pulled out from renting his land after a lot of pressure and harassment from various police forces.

The farmer, who wishes to remain anonymous, was visited, sometimes twice a day, by Gatwick police (Sussex) and both Horley and Reigate police (Surrey) in tandem during the course of the last two weeks. By September 13, the pressure, both from police and neighbouring farmers, became too much for the farmer to bear, especially when a number of reporters started to ring him up, and he called the organisers to say he was pulling out of the agreement.

The police consistently tried to paint a nasty picture of the potential camp participants but their priority seemed to be putting pressure on him to sign an agreement with the police to let them on his land during the camp.

Since then police seem to have changed tactics, calling on neighbouring farmers and asking them to complain directly to the landlord to pull out of the agreement. The landowner said: “It seems like they have really pulled all the dirty tricks in their book to stop this camp from happening. They have tried to turn my neighbours against me.”

This wasn’t all. On September 13, a phone call from Inspector Elaine Burtenshaw, the Tandridge district police’s neighbourhood officer, asked the camp organisers to cancel the camp “because of the foot and mouth outbreak”. She said that campaigners had better postpone the camp or consider even cancelling it now rather than wait until next week, when they “may be forced to cancel it anyway due to the restrictions”.

The camp organisers immediately contacted the department for environment, food and rural affairs and the environmental health office at Tandridge district council and both said there was “absolutely no reason” why they should not go ahead with the camp as far as the foot and mouth crisis is concerned. They were told they do not even need to have straw and disinfectant at the entrances and exits, which they had offered to do.

In any case, the camp organisers have now managed to find a new site, and another lease was signed a few days ago. The new land, owner by another local farmer, is near the village of Balcombe in West Sussex. Camp organisers said the location of the new site had been withheld until now “for fear of further police harassment and pressure on the new landlord”.

Harassment
Harassment

All very well

Hands Off the People of Iran’s focus on fighting on both fronts is disingenuous, in that it plays down the nuclear threat to Iran and has untold global repercussions (‘Smearing solidarity’, September 13). Considering there are over a million Iraqis dead, it is sensible to highlight this by the slogan, ‘Hands off Iran’.

To organise another campaign at the same time against the islamic regime is playing into the hands of the enemy. Solidarity with Iranians as an oppressed people is all very well, but should not be linked with the utter insanity of US plans. Why not just demand international communism and show solidarity with more people? A ‘Hands Off Iran’/international communism campaign would truly highlight the absurd nature of your dual campaign. Regime change begins at home.

What is frustrating is the political naivety that can’t see that US ‘shock and awe’ tactics may kill millions of Iranians. However, Hopi makes regime change in Iran both an imperialist and communist goal. It is open to the charge of neo-con puppetry, as it augments the cold war role of western propaganda, whose main goal is to demonise Iran and its people - a people in need of help from the west, which should be highlighting its own torturers and war criminals and potential war crimes.

Indeed, solidarity with the people of Iran in the warmongering nations should focus mostly on the antics of the warmongers. Why demonise Iran? That is the job of the imperialist war machine.

What is solidarity? Getting your priorities right - at a time of war the beating of one’s own country and its allies. I think it is the highest duty of communists to defend the national sovereignty of the target nation and it is more courageous to do this than to act as cheerleader for the imperialist propaganda machine, which plays the reactionary role of underplaying the actual US threat.

All very well

Conciliation

Paul B Smith is clearly well intentioned, but he is also annoyingly pompous and, worse, dangerously naive (Letters, September 13). The political approach he offers certainly points straight to hell.

All he can see in the to and fro argument between the CPGB and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is narrow-minded group loyalty and the use of naughty words, such as “twerp”, “idiots”, “oaf”, etc. He refuses to take sides. He refuses to take a principled stand.

According to comrade Smith’s account, there is no “objective grounds for the dispute”. After all, he reasons, the CPGB calls for imperialist troops out of the Middle East, while the AWL calls for solidarity with Iraqi workers. Comrade Smith cannot spot the difference.

Instead we should build the Campaign for a Marxist Party and found a real Marxist party. In that cosy atmosphere all such minor issues can be cosily settled without “animosity” and “playground petulance”. There is a Marxist category used to describe comrade Smith’s approach - conciliationism.

The differences keeping the CPGB and the AWL apart are of huge importance. Nothing trivial, narrow or artificial. The CPGB demands the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of US-UK forces from Iraq. By contrast the AWL thought the “right side” won in the Gulf War and today refuses to call for US-UK troops out. Darkly it warns of a bloodbath. Implicitly it sees progressive content in the US-UK occupation. In other words the AWL is social-imperialist.

An example from history. Henry Hyndman was the leader of the British Socialist Party at the beginning of World War I and made much of his internationalist solidarity with workers in Germany. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were singled out for their brave stand against the kaiser and Prussian barbarism.

However, whereas Luxemburg and Liebknecht opposed their own ruling class, Hyndman supported his. The British government’s war aims were progressive and just, he insisted. Workers were urged to join the ranks of the army. Not surprisingly, Hyndman was polemically savaged - and not only in Britain, but internationally. Lenin branded him a scoundrel, a hypocrite and a chauvinist.

Presumably comrade Smith recognises something of substance in these denunciations. Or were they, too, motivated by petty group loyalty?

Comrade Smith’s naivety means he trivialises politics. He seems completely unaware that this has nothing to do with the authentic Marxist tradition. Indeed comrade Smith comes over more like citizen Smith.

Conciliation
Conciliation

Regroup

The current row in Respect reveals the bankruptcy of the whole project. However, the CPGB’s concrete demands seem mere mischief-making (‘George Galloway demands the scalp of John Rees - so do we’, September 13). To call for expulsions from the Socialist Workers Party rather than a change of line or a change of leadership (ie, the demotion of the ‘first couple’ - John Rees and Lindsey German) will merely entrench members in their current position.

As you implicitly admit, it is the SWP members who, in however distorted a form, represent the wing of Respect with some linkage to organised labour, as the Tower Hamlets disputes indicate. Anybody who sides with Galloway - out of anger at the SWP’s failure to turn Respect into a proper party and frequently resort to undemocratic manoeuvres that alienated independent leftists within the membership - is making a major political error. The authoritarian, narcissistic Stalinist demagogue should be consigned to the dustbin of history as soon as possible.

Whilst I can understand why a Taliban fan like Yvonne Ridley and the Bengali businessmen who form the majority faction in Tower Hamlets are taking up the cudgels for ‘Gorgeous George’, I fail to understand why Alan Thornett and the national leadership of the International Socialist Group are doing so. An alliance with petty bourgeois communalist careerists and fanatical rightwing political islamists (Ridley and Dr Naseem) is not a stepping stone to a new broad workers’ party of the type the USFI have supported in Italy or Germany (and even tried to initiate in France).

As the Brown-Thatcher love-in on the doorstep of No10 indicates, the Labour Party is just another capitalist party. We urgently need a new workers’ party. This means reaching out to the RMT, FBU, PCS and other unions drawn into struggles across the public sector, as well as to campaigners against NHS cuts, post office closures, attacks on council housing and so on, not to the bizarre collection of chancers and lunatics gathered around Saddam’s sycophant.

In short, all socialists of whatever variety should abandon Respect in favour of a regroupment that would include such forces as the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and the Socialist Alliance, as well as the National Shop Stewards Network and the RMT.

Regroup

Vendetta

I speak only for myself when I say how sad it is to see this constant inter-rivalry and antagonism within the revolutionary socialist movement. It is even worse in the USA.

It seems to me that all that is accomplished by this often nasty literary vendetta is to further encourage the reactionaries to subvert our cause.

Vendetta
Vendetta

SWP mindset

Thanks for publishing my article (‘Has history refuted dialectics’, September 13), but had I known it was going to appear in the same issue as that long article on John Rees I would not have sent it. I wonder how you can publish such rubbish about him and the SWP in general.

I used to be in the SWP and will rejoin it when my project is finished. I want nothing more to do with you.

SWP mindset

Change of cats

Rosa Lichtenstein imagines she has irrefutably seen off dialectical materialism. Poor old Frederick Engels should have realised that male cats do not turn into their opposites - female cats. And the comrade claims to be a supporter of historical materialism and, I presume, a revolutionary socialist.

On the evidence of her tortured article, nothing she says can be taken seriously. Nor can the CPGB. All it does is publish crap like this and constantly snipe at good people like John Rees and others who are doing the real work by building broad movements such as the Stop the War Coalition, Unite Against Fascism and Respect.

Change of cats

Change of mind

Rosa Lichtenstein’s article makes some interesting points. However, in the case of water remaining H₂O whether it is solid, liquid or gas - surely the qualitative change is the change of state itself.

Also, in the case of the mouse, pony and elephant - there has been no qualitative change to the pony itself, but a change of perception on the part of the observer: ie, whether the pony is relatively big or small.

It is obviously a very complex subject. There may be something to the idea that a weakness in dialectical theory led to Marxism falling from favour in the modern world. However, I suspect the reasons are much more varied and complex than this.

Change of mind