Letters

Self-abuse

I’m sure that if Jim Dymond and I met over a cup of tea or a glass of fruit juice, we would get on well (Letters, November 29). Both of us are fighting for qualitative social change.

I’m not trying to idealise the past - there was a lot wrong with it. I don’t want to go back to Victorian values, but forward to socialism and socialist values. I also want to understand the past, including how and why Marxists have become a collection of tiny fratricidal sects and no longer have an influence on the class.

I live where I was born - in Greenwich in south east London. The block of flats which constitutes my home was once a pleasant place to live, not least because two former Communist Party members lived here. Over the years the sale of council housing under Thatcher’s right to buy and the legal obligation of the council to vulnerable people has led to an influx of tenants with addiction and mental health problems. These people get little help and support because social workers and community psychiatric nurses, having suffered violent attacks, refuse to do home visits. There are problems, including crime and anti-social behaviour, which are not being addressed. At best, the police come along and pick up the pieces. Sadly, the tenants’ association has little power to do anything effective.

I don’t know what Jim considers to be a minority. But I do know that admissions to hospital for alcohol-related reasons have risen to 23,000 a year, some teenagers being too drunk to recognise their own mothers, and 50,000 people are claiming incapacity benefit on the grounds of alcoholism. These are problems that should be of concern to socialists and for which solutions must be found.

We may not be able to attract the weak and foolish, the tosspots and binge drinkers, to a disciplined revolutionary movement - the inspiration for which would not be the Taliban, but the Red Guards of the October Revolution, the pre-war German RFKB, the Chinese 4th Route Army and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. But if we can attract the minority that is strong enough to give up booze and other forms of self-abuse we can go on to make it a majority.

A different world is possible and with discipline and determination we can build it.

Self-abuse
Self-abuse

Pathetic

The view of the Independent Left in the Public and Commercial Services union seems to be: ‘We can’t win enough support for our views inside Left Unity, so let’s split away and divide the left vote’ (‘Which way for PCS left?’, December 6).

File under ‘Definition of sectarianism’. Pathetic.

Pathetic
Pathetic

Social equality

I proposed three motions to the Campaign for a Marxist Party conference of November 24. The first, on a world party, was rejected, obviously because it was too ‘Trotskyist’.

The proposals on the rights of tendencies and factions were not allowed after Mike Macnair’s objection (perhaps he might need some such protection some day). It had already been rejected by John Bridge because “All comrade Downing needs then is one co-thinker and he can get his feet under the committee table” (‘A rough guide’, November 22).

The motion itself, however, specifically proposed that “Tendencies will have the right to representation on the leading committee of the campaign in proportion to the votes obtained for their platform.” This clearly means that, in an organisation of 100 with a central committee/executive of 10, 10 votes would be necessary to secure a place on the committee. In no way could two votes secure this, as comrade Bridge wrongly claimed, but the rejection of the motion allows a majority of one to have 100% of the committee - extreme democracy bourgeois style, I would suggest. If the motion had been accepted, the Democratic Socialist Alliance would have secured a place on the new committee.

The rejection of the third motion was also of great concern. “To organise the working class to lead a revolution to overthrow capitalism in Britain and internationally and build a communist society based on full social and economic equality” was rejected by comrade Bridge “because Marxism is surely the established theory and practice of universal human liberation. It is therefore necessarily internationalist. Hence there is no need for comrade Downing’s addition, especially as there are no self-declared national socialists in our ranks. As to ‘full social and economic equality’, this smacks of a utopian throwback.”

Interestingly it was suggested to me during debate that if I was to agree to abandon the phrase “full social and economic equality”, then the rest would be passed. ‘Equality’ was a bourgeois concept, it seemed, and the only comrade to oppose the motion in debate suggested that ‘equality’ was wrong because we were all different.

Indeed I do regard the term ‘social equality’, as in David North’s Social Equality Party, as a bourgeois concept and therefore unsupportable. It is bourgeois because it simply retreats to the legal fiction of equality of the citizen in the eyes of the state, which Marx condemns so eloquently in On the Jewish question. He contrast this legal equality of the state to civil society, where people are forced to grovel and subordinate themselves before the masters of life and are therefore alienated from their species-essence by the social relations engendered by the market economy.

But how can anyone oppose the aspiration of “full social and economic equality”? If this it is a “utopian throwback”, then Marx is a “utopian throwback”. In the communist society of the future superabundance of life’s necessities will render all ranks within human society and all money exchange defunct.

And here we might acknowledge a weakness in the formulation. Pol Pot did elaborate such a vision too, but based on the rural idyll and abolition of city culture, necessitating mass slaughter of surplus population. Therefore the phrase “based on Marx’s superabundance precondition” is necessary, so the addendum to the aims would read: “To organise the working class to lead a revolution to overthrow capitalism in Britain and internationally to achieve full social and economic equality by building the communist society of the future based on Marx’s superabundance precondition.” Is that a “utopian throwback” too?

However, simply to delete the phrase leaves us with: “To organise the working class to lead a revolution to overthrow capitalism in Britain and internationally and build a communist society”. This sounds a lot like Stalin’s USSR, which is as good as we can do, according to the whole of Stalinist propaganda. ‘Really existing socialism’ is really no inspiration for revolutionary youth of the future - although it might appeal to many left Stalinists in the Middle East.

Social equality

Distinction

Steve Wallis writes: “Marxists believe that communism can only occur after years of socialism”.

Marxists believe no such thing. The socialism/communism distinction is not found in the writings of Marx. It’s true that he distinguished between lower and higher phases of communism, but that is very different. Technological progress since Marx’s day means that production for use and free access can be introduced when socialism (or communism - I don’t care what term is used) is established.

Distinction
Distinction

Travesty

Not having read Ben Harker’s Class act: the cultural and political life of Ewan MacColl, I have no idea whether Lawrence Parker’s review of it fairly reflects the biography or not (‘A “people’s” tragedy’, December 6).

What I am certain of is that the review bore no relationship whatever to the politics and outlook of MacColl. Those who knew him know he was a million miles away from the dry and sterile politics of the CPGB at least from the late 60s onwards, and one would suggest by his terrific innovations and enthusiasm long, long before that. Ewan and Peggy Seeger embraced the tide of revolutionary optimism which was sweeping the world and particularly the western world during the period.

Ewan’s songs verified the revolutionary youth, the anti-imperialist struggle, the struggle of black people and women, and more directly the workers’ struggle, the revolution as we have seen it breaking out in all its many varieties and manifestations. In those days we considered Tricontinental as the nearest thing to a genuine communist international, covering as it did armed struggle and anti-imperialist forces the world over in a solidaristic and non-sectarian fashion.

Along with that came Ewan’s New city songster, the musical accompaniment and acclamation of most of those struggles. Folk music and political songs were in the vanguard of important sections of the movement. Back then they attracted huge followings at clubs and festivals all over the country.

It may seem unlikely today, but in the 60s and 70s large numbers of workers, young and old, were drawn into the movement by this rough and raw industrial folk music in praise of class struggle and workers’ history. These songs were about us, and the work we did. They were monuments to the workers and their toil and political aspirations. They were triggers in a greater search for working class history per se.

I couldn’t possibly explain the impact of Ewan’s songs which broke to accompany the great coal strike of 1984-85. Young miners and their families who had only ever listened to pop and tin pan alley seized these songs as their anthems; they were a fighting response to the media propaganda. Within days of ‘Daddy, what did you do in the strike?’ being penned, it was being sung in miners’ bars and clubs and at mass rallies by people who had never heard of ‘folk music’, never mind Ewan MacColl. To a lesser extent the same was true of his earlier class and protest anthems.

Ewan and Peggy were never ever sectarian. They supported causes and platforms regardless of who had set them up and who else was on there with them so long as it was a platform of working class resistance and revolutionary struggle. Their appearance as guests of the OLAS (basically guerrilla) conference in 1963 in Cuba brought them into contact with political fighters across the political piece.

They had visited and sang across China and witnessed what seemed to be attempts at genuine workers’ democracy (we know now it didn’t succeed). Indeed Peggy lost her US citizenship as a result of this visit. Their music throughout the Vietnam war was in praise of armed struggle and stood alongside those of us who called for victory rather than peace in Vietnam. I was (and still am) a passionate anti-Stalinist, and me and Ewan argued the clock round on many occasions, but usually before or after joint political activity and mass working class struggles which not just us two, but the bulk of the movement, were engaged in.

Lawrence seems to suggest that at some stage Ewan accepted Labour Party gradualism and parliament and abandoned revolutionary action and ideology. I’m not quoting verbatim here, but if that is the case it’s news to me and I think Ewan would be turning in his grave to hear anyone saying that. In fact, my experience tells me Ewan never lost his belief in mass workers’ struggle and direct physical challenges to the state and a revolutionary road to socialism.

Lawrence doesn’t understand the aims of the folk song revival or the ethos of the Singers’ Club and Critics’ Group, particularly in terms of invigorating and discovering one’s own specific folk traditions, and I will not test the readers’ patience by explaining it to him. Enough to say that by the early 60s all music was thought of as American, and nobody could sing in an English accent of any variety (at least until the Beatles). Folk music when it started to emerge was dominated by singers who adopted Irish accents or that strange ‘oo-arr’ Wurzles accent, and who were unaware that everywhere had a folk tradition, everywhere had its own songs, music and dialect.

Making singers, at least at the clubs and folk societies they influenced, actually sing something from their own region and ethnicity was a fairly obvious starting point. This wasn’t to ignore the massive influence of Irish, Scottish and American folk music. How foolish to suggest this was the case. It was to kick-start and save from extinction priceless traditions of music and song from the rest of Britain. It was something in class and regional terms like the ‘black pride’ movement, which was basically a feature of the same movement and motivation.

I sincerely hope Harker’s book isn’t as bad as Lawrence’s review of it suggests. If it is, then it’s a travesty of history and a man’s life.

Travesty
Travesty

Principled

First, I write to congratulate the Hands Off the People of Iran campaign on last Saturday’s launch conference. It was an amazing experience. Not only was there a huge amount of open, honest debate, but it was great to see that a principled anti-war campaign, which condemns the appalling policies of the Iranian regime, is going from strength to strength.

Secondly, I write in response to Peter Manson’s article on the crisis in the Socialist Workers Party (‘Crisis can no longer be hidden’, December 6).

As a member of the SWP myself, I am well aware of what tactics the party employs. I first began to have my doubts about the leadership when Hopi was expelled from the Stop the War Coalition and the Respect crisis began. At the time, I resolved that it was better to stay in the party, since it was the biggest force on the left and was achieving great things on my campus at Manchester University, and in support of Karen Reissmann’s dispute. Since then, I have seen Respect split nationally, and seen my own SWP branch hold a counter-meeting, under the nominal banner of the STWC, to the launch of Hopi in Manchester, and effectively shut down a local student STWC branch. Furthermore, I have been bullied time and again by the leaders of my branch to give up my principled left stance and my public support for Hopi.

I have now come to realise that, far from being a positive force, my party, under its current leadership, has become one of the most destructive forces on the left. I am in total agreement when Peter Manson calls for a “principled left wing to emerge” in the SWP. If one doesn’t, or it fails, there are only two possible results: either the leadership wins and carries on destroying any chances for left unity; or the party, as this paper predicts, collapses in on itself and not only carries on haemorrhaging members (either through expulsions or resignations), as it currently is, but ceases to exist as a force at all.

In the current climate, this may not be such a bad thing.

Principled
Principled

People or state?

Why ‘Hands Off the People of Iran’ rather than ‘Hands Off Iran’? The emphasis on concern for the people, presumably as distinct from the state, may simply be symptomatic of an excessive self-consciousness that is not untypical among diaspora and exile communities. Many Iranians living in the UK and the USA are understandably keen to distance themselves from the oppressive and authoritarian islamic regime and its venal ultra-conservative front man, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their sentiments are no doubt shared by many leftwing activists who are involved in the anti-war movement.

To indulge this sensibility at this juncture would, however, be a mistake, because we are living in a time when pro-war news management has entailed, among other things, a concerted effort to establish a delineation between a regime and its people, in order that the perception and understanding of the true horror of war be obfuscated or at least obscured, so that wars can be perceived and felt as a series of abstract tactical and strategic moves in which certain key state actors are ‘ousted’, ‘changed’ or ‘removed’ at will, while ‘the people’ are quite distinct and, by implication, less harmed. This sanitisation of war in the public mind is essential to the workings of imperialism, and has a history which predates the Bush administration by some considerable time.

To implicitly accept this delineation as a valid one is to pave the way for the eventuality that is perhaps most likely at any rate - the carrying out of so-called ‘surgical strikes’ against key targets. The official line will inform us that this is not war - it is an ‘operation’ or a ‘series of strikes’, aimed no doubt at key military or alleged nuclear installations. They would, in all likelihood, be sold to the public on the basis that only the infrastructure of the Iranian ‘state’ would be affected, and not its people. Such strikes would of course amount to war by any normal understanding of the word, save in the lexicon of the US state department and, on current indications, of Hopi, by whose reckoning the “people of Iran” would be largely unaffected. This pernicious distinction between a regime and its people is a marketing gimmick of imperialism, and it is essential that it is recognised as such.

At the time of writing, it would seem that the situation appears to have abated, albeit, in all probability, only temporarily. However uncomfortable it may feel, resistance to any future crisis must be expressed in terms of unqualified support for the Iranian state.

People or state?
People or state?