Letters

Threats

It is nice to see a mention of the nuclear threat to Iran (Letters, January 17), but the point is that I have been trying to make is that a campaign on two fronts deprioritises the very real threat to Iran.

The oppression of homosexuals is indeed horrible, but it is a universal struggle, as are other particular struggles. Singling out Iran for special treatment plays into the hands of the enemy.

Pushing the human rights campaign in particular targeted countries has always been part of the war strategy of the imperialist war party. Putting it at the centre of one’s own anti-war strategy has been divisive and panders to illusions of bourgeois democracy in our own country.

The anti-nuclear threat agenda should be at the top of our slogans. Take the nuclear option off the table, take war off the table. That alone should be our defining slogan. It is not a matter of confusing the masses but of taking a responsible position that has sound socialist politics, which is after all the language of priorities.

Stop pretending you are highlighting this issue more than you are promoting the human rights agenda - an agenda that can easily be hijacked by bourgeois politicians. What I find embarrassing is the idea that the CPGB is utterly unquestioning on the role of Hopi. Sound principles have to be given proper priority, and not used to provoke sectarian squabbles on the left.

Threats
Threats

Nonsense

Tam Dean Burn is simply talking nonsense in relation to Ewan MacColl (Letters, January 17).

For the record, the “disrespectful disgrace” to which he refers was a book review in which I traced MacColl’s decline from a position where he was prepared to take from the most advanced international cultural practitioners in the communist movement in the 1930s to his post-war evolution into cultural nationalism (‘A “people’s” tragedy’, December 6). In other words, I implied what I thought was good and bad about MacColl. Tam, on the other hand, appears to want to have MacColl uncritically installed as some kind of timeless artistic pin-up boy.

Funnily enough, from reading interviews in The Leninist with supporters of the ‘new’ Workers Theatre Movement from the 1980s, I get the impression that they were also keener on the MacColl of the 1930s Red Megaphones era. Presumably Tam and others in the WTM didn’t inflict a MacColl-type rule where performers could only work on pieces from their ‘own’ national tradition?

Aye, perhaps Tam’s artless letter only really shows how soft he currently is on the politics of cultural nationalism. Still, any port in a storm, eh, comrade?

But then this type of eulogising belongs to an older type of left Stalinist politics that The Leninist had begun to throw off: the type of politics where a succession of ‘hail this or that’ and ‘long live this or that’ becomes a substitution for a serious intersection with the world. Tam’s incarnation of the WTM has had no real impact or legacy, partly because it was born into a reactionary political period, but also because it never convincingly moved beyond Stalinist aesthetics.

Nonsense
Nonsense

Justice

I would recommend to Dave Douglass that he reads Ben Harker’s biography of Ewan MacColl. It is much better than Lawrence Parker’s review. But thanks for the review and the debate. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bought it.

In response to Tam Dean Burn, I knew Ewan and Peggy’s contribution to the folk movement as a regular attendee of the Singers’ Club. However, this biography makes clear his massive contribution to socialist theatre and radio drama. Ewan could be a difficult man to work with, but there is no doubt he remained a socialist to the end and his gift to the workers’ movement should be honoured. Fortunately, this biography does him justice.

Justice
Justice

Yawn

James Turley speaks of ‘no platform for fascists’ on the campuses and the NUS and of the boots and fists of Anti-Fascist Action (Letters, January 17).

Big yawn. The working class lives and works in places that comrade Turley has probably never been. Likewise, the real working class has never seen the inside of a campus, except maybe to clean one. When discussing politics in my local, we talk about better wages and better housing. We are not idealists by any means. We couldn’t care less who is in power (left or right) as long as our lot gets better. And, as for AFA, etc, we have never come across one of their members and would surmise that they come from the middle classes and are bred on comrade Turley’s campuses.

I would also like to ask any comrade if they can tell me how to explain to my pals why open borders would be a good idea when we struggle now to get housing for ourselves, let alone for thousands more incomers.

Yawn
Yawn

Ridiculous

I’m afraid that Paul Anderson is most mistaken if he actually believes Hands Off the People of Iran to be guilty of waging a “proxy sectarian war” against the SWP (Letters, January 10).

Perhaps our comrade could explain why the SWP-controlled Stop the War Coalition expelled us? Or why the SWP have so far attempted to undermine us and our anti-war campaigning at every turn? He might also like to shed some light on this: “The Iranian regime has to be defended not from its people but from US-UK threats”. No, me neither.

I suspect our comrade is somewhat confused about what Hopi is. We don’t defend the Iranian regime from “its people”. We support the struggle of students, women, the LGBT community, trade unionists and workers in Iran. We are an anti-war campaign in solidarity with the Iranian people; unlike the SWP, we have not completely lost sight of our working class politics.

Lastly, Hopi is doing all it can to strengthen the anti-war movement in this country. Perhaps comrade Anderson could spend more time doing the same, rather than coming out with such ridiculous and unfounded statements.

Ridiculous
Ridiculous

Too expensive?

Comrade Bridge’s article raises an important question when it comes to the price, nature and purpose of our paper (‘An appeal to members, supporters and friends’, January 17). However, I cannot disagree more with the tactic of making a party publication deliberately expensive.

The Weekly Worker aims to be an organisational and educational tool for the CPGB and the wider left, that much is certain. However, if it’s a party organiser it must also necessarily be a class organiser, if only because of the obvious links between a working class movement and its political vanguard. The process of building a communist party will necessarily entail a steady recomposition of our class, as well as the existing left.

This means that we have to tailor our approach towards those we are looking to engage, which, when not involving content, will entail price, accessibility and layout. In simple terms, this may mean appealing to those who won’t consider a paper costing one pound to be ‘reassuringly expensive’ or anything like that. A complete political novice on a demonstration may be interested in the Weekly Worker but perplexed as to why it costs so much in comparison to other left papers. Ultimately, they may be coerced away by an overly pushy paper seller from the Socialist Workers Party.

In financial matters, I don’t think it’s even a case that raising our prices will mean more cash in party coffers. In fact, lowering the price could end in a favourable result for us, simply because it may result in more sales which surpass the revenue bought in from the formerly higher price.

To be honest, I have never read any Iskra from the source. I would certainly like to. But I think the method of solely engaging with the existing left, as in being at the stage of “the primitive accumulation of cadres”, is somewhat problematic. First off, while the bulk of Weekly Worker articles do adopt this approach, and perhaps rightly so, the paper is still accessible to intelligent workers who may not currently be involved in the movement. I imagine many who are not CPGB, SWP, Committee for a Workers’ International or anything else will find the combative coverage of important events to be of interest. I would like to think the impressive number of readers per week backs this up.

Additionally, there is no dividing line between ‘going to the masses’ and staying within the movement as a view towards eventual unity. The two are not mutually exclusive and do not need to be. The party necessarily grows out of the class (I don’t for a moment hold to the young Lenin’s idea that the intellectuals of the actually exploiting class can somehow develop a revolutionary consciousness and become the prime component in a communist party, and it’s pretty clear that from 1905 onwards that he didn’t either) and therefore the act of both developing a communist party and unifying the varying fragments of the left will entail a two-way approach between internal politics (the existing class movement) and outward propagandising (the masses).

Too expensive?
Too expensive?

Joker

I noted, with some amusement, the following from John Bridge’s article: “People read what we have to say because it is of quality, not because of reassuring and essentially vacuous snippets about the latest strike, demonstration and rally. They want reliable, authoritative and well edited polemical debate and thoughtful political analysis” (January 17).

The real joke is that he actually believes this.

Joker
Joker

Pro-nuclear

I appreciated Simon Wells’ straightforward and honest assessment, from his point of view, of nuclear energy (‘Nuclear power irrationality’, January 17). I do have an opposing opinion, however.

One way to look at it is the general issue of nuclear power as a clean, carbon-free source of energy. It is a technological perspective. The other is the specifics of the British experience with nuclear energy. This experience, to say the least, is unfortunate. The British did a lot of things wrong in the 1960s through the 1980s.

The first thing that comes to mind is their choice of reactor model, the most expensive of the time, unproven, prone to high maintenance and decommissioning costs. Secondly, they never built those decommissioning costs into the capitalisation of the plants. Now, taxpayers have to foot the bill. It’s important to note in this discussion that the UK was the only country in the world with nuclear energy that failed to do this. Even the poorly organised US nuclear power infrastructure has taken care of this particular problem.

And it is important to look at other countries and how they built their nuclear energy programmes. The US was and is famous for its tremendous cost overruns (even through these plants are now the profitable part of any utility’s fleet of power plants). But in other countries this is not the case. The US built, for example, unique plants, with utilities designating specific and expensive design features. No two plants in the US are alike because of this. This reflected the anarchy of capitalist ‘planning’, where regulation was a dirty word and investments were to be free of interfering government.

But France’s state-owned industry produced reliable and modularly manufactured power plants, where all were of a specific design with only a few variations. Few complain about the costs of nuclear power in France, largely because it is so cheap.

In the US most of the subsidies that are usually spoken in the same breath as ‘US nuclear’ were paid out over 30 and 40 years ago. Little of the nuclear sector today in the US is ‘subsidised’ in any way by the taxpayer.

The nuclear waste bugaboo is also the thing that sits in the public mind. But keep in mind that nuclear is the only industry that has to account for every gram of waste, from its mining to its final disposal. There is no other technology that has to do this. In the US there are 77,000 tons of the high-level stuff that people are afraid of. This is after 50 years of commercial operation. The UK volume is about one-fifth of this amount. Keep in mind that this waste is totally managed, around the clock, 365 days a year and, in the US, no-one has ever died because of it. No-one. This seemingly large number of 77,000 tons, in volume, would barely cover the playing area of an average British football field to a depth of maybe eight metres. That’s it. Total. Compare that to an average coal-fired plant that produced one million tons per year of coal ash.

From the point of view of risk, nuclear waste is a far less dangerous substance than the millions of tons of particulate, CO₂ and ash, laden as it is with uranium, mercury, thorium and other heavy metals.

In the US today coal plants are responsible for an estimated 30,000 deaths a year and 10 times that number of respiratory illnesses. Nuclear deaths? Zero. I think most anti-nuclear advocates have simply lost all sense of proportion and do not understand actual risk assessment.

Almost all nuclear waste is not waste at all. It’s unspent fuel. It’s only waste if you want to throw it away in a hole and bury it. Unspent fuel is guarded under the same procedures as a nuclear power plant. The waste from all 430 nuclear power plants in the world just sits in water getting slowly cooler over time. All of it can be recycled, since little of the actual energy content is ever used in a nuclear power plant.

If one wants to get rid of spent fuel, one has to have a plan. This is a question I’d pose to Simon and other opponents of nuclear energy: if every nuclear plant were shut down tomorrow, the unspent fuel is still there. What would you do with it if you were in government today? Pro-nuclear advocates have a plan: they are for further refining it, burning it up in new nuclear plants and getting rid of the majority of the volume of spent fuel. To argue this, however, means you have to be for nuclear energy. To oppose nuclear power means opposing getting rid of it. Quite the conundrum, yes?

Furthermore, the imperialist governments of France, the US and the UK all have thousands of plutonium-filled bombs. I’m for getting rid of these devices.

The US and Russia have worked out a ‘megatons-to-megawatts’ programme that takes these dangerous devices and turns them into fuel. Plutonium makes better fuel than uranium does and half of all US power plants are fuelled by former Russian warheads. Now all we have to do is get Britain, France and the US to turn their nuclear weapons into useful energy. This would be a real leftwing point of view. But the majority of the left, unfortunately, is so caught up with the religion of anti-nuclear fundamentalism they’ve lost the forest for the trees.

I can’t make a judgment on Britain’s new nuclear plans. I’m for a socialised energy system in Britain, as I am everywhere. But I also support the technology the British utilities will use, which are the much cheaper, modularly built, less waste-producing light water reactors now being built in Japan and China. It is a far safer technology, far more reliable. It is two generations ahead of what the UK uses now. And they produce no particulate or CO₂.

I think the British left ought to rethink its opposition to nuclear energy. I would gladly participate in any such forums, online, to further flesh this out.

Pro-nuclear
Pro-nuclear