Letters
Sad to say
How does Jim Dymond know he would not benefit from a lecture on the health and social dangers of alcohol (Letters, January 31)? He is, I hope, a rational person and I may convince him my arguments are correct. A recent survey into the 20 most widely used drugs has revealed that alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy, so there is scientific evidence to substantiate my contentions.
No, I couldn’t vote until I was 21, but at 18 I could drink myself into stupidity and, sad to say, I did. In some parts of the United States the legal drinking age is 21. All we have to do is see how it works there and adapt these measures to British conditions.
Prohibitionists have a big job convincing the majority that theirs is the only answer to the sea of alcohol in which Britain is drowning, but then socialists also have a big job in convincing people that socialism is the answer to all the horrors of capitalism. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
If parents deprive their children in order to buy alcohol then it is time for social services to intervene. I doubt if society would let heroin addicts look after children, so why should alcohol addicts be allowed to do so?
The Red Army at one time banned its troops from drinking alcohol at any time. Banning some people for some of the time from drinking alcohol is not prohibition, but it is a step on the path to that end.
Sad to say
Sad to say
Bloody cheek
Given that Dave Douglass hasn’t actually read Ben Harker’s book on Ewan MacColl, he has got a bloody cheek surmising that I have misrepresented the author (Letters, January 31). Why not actually read the book first, comrade?
This is the second time in this debate that Douglass has misrepresented me, which is a bore, quite frankly. Again, I’m not wasting my time debunking all of the eulogistic stream of consciousness that has been uncritically dished up. However, I will deal with Dave’s own core misrepresentation.
I hope he does finally manage to flip the cover of Harker’s book. It is a million miles away from being one-sided sentimental guff. It is both sympathetic to MacColl’s work and critical of some aspects of his legacy. That is also reflected in my review: I think MacColl produced good things and bad things, excellent ideas and awful ones.
But Douglass wants me to agree with his simple statement that: “Ewan’s work throughout his life was useful, inspirational and revolutionary.” This is a bland, uncritical and lifeless method, reminiscent of Stalinism.
Indeed, Harker’s book contains other areas that we haven’t discussed as yet that also show MacColl in a poor light: an extreme lack of democracy in the Critics Group; Peggy Seeger herself is critical in Harker’s book of some of her and Ewan’s past preconceptions; and a blinkered, sectarian approach to the products of popular culture (ie, what huge numbers of ‘folk’ where actually listening to), notable in MacColl’s fuddy-duddy critique of Bob Dylan, which probably only served to tell the world that British communist folk singers had nothing whatsoever to impart to the subject. If you have no ambition to relate in some way to popular culture - beyond merely dissing it from inside the confines of a purist ‘folk’ tent - then you are not truly in politics, I would suggest.
Also, what is this rubbish of Hugh Kerr that Douglass clings to, that Harker’s book is “much better than Lawrence Parker’s review”? Well, I would hope so, given that Harker spent years investigating the topic! What actually does that disprove in the review?
A review is always going to be an abstraction of what it discusses. Presumably, Dumb and Dumber prefer a bland summary of contents. Even better, I could have just copied the book out.
It is an accepted practice in Weekly Worker reviews to reflect the gist of a book and for the reviewer to offer their own opinion. I’m sorry that has proved to be so confusing for the comrades.
Dave should really have a long, hard think (or even a long, hard read?) before he starts implying misrepresentation on my part.
Bloody cheek
Bloody cheek
I was there
Gerry Downing was indeed wrong to say that Revolution were absent from the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demo in Berlin (Letters, January 31). I was there and I saw them.
For that matter, there were also a few of them present with a banner at a Kurdish solidarity demo in Berlin on January 26. Actually, I seem to go to the same events as they do, at least in Germany.
I was there
I was there
Well red
Well done, Chris Strafford, for your review of the film Reds (‘Epic film’, January 31). At last, something good said about anarchists in the Weekly Worker.
Well red
Well red
Von who?
The Siné cartoon on p14 of Jack Conrad’s Fantastic reality is one of my favourites. For many years I had a large poster of it hanging on our kitchen wall. It certainly predates 1971.
Below the cartoon, the artist is described as “von Siné” - where did you get the “von” from? The guy’s name was/is (?) Maurice Sinet and he was (of course) French.
Von who?
Von who?
Platform
Wladek Flakin get things completely wrong (Letters, January 31). He accuses myself and the CPGB of embracing, or at least toying with, third period Stalinism. Why? Because I supposedly cite approvingly the tactics employed by the Communist Party of Germany in the early 1930s. Comrade Flakin then treats us in his letter to a standard Trotskyite lecture about the crimes and misdemeanours of the Stalinist KDP. All very well and good, comrade.
A little problem, however. You write about the early 1930s. I was writing about the early 1920s - a time when the KDP could hardly be said to be Stalinist. If you have to have an argument, it really is worth accurately reading what your opponent has to say … otherwise we end up wasting time and energy.
Bill Jeffries of the Permanent Revolution group has also recently taken me to task over my articles on the British National Party and the no platform tactic (www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=1902). Unfortunately, his piece too is full of misrepresentation … and, in his case, almost hysterical posturing. Nonetheless, it is just about worth responding to, even though it does little more than rehash old ideas - tried, tested and failed.
Comrade Bill’s underlying problem is his stubborn unwillingness, or perhaps his inability, to appreciate that debating with the BNP is not in any way counterposed to working class self-defence or to organising an armed militia. Both of which form an integral part of our immediate programme.
Using violence against the BNP or any other anti-working class group or party, must, however, be seen as a tactical question. Turning this into some sort of shibboleth has nothing to do with Marxism.
Bill insists it is I who is confusing tactics and principles by my “advocacy of debate over no platform”. Yet, as my articles have made clear, it is not a case of advocating one tactic over the other (as he does) but approaching this and indeed every question on the basis of a balanced and sober judgement of various pros and cons - in my opinion the great strength of Marxist politics - as opposed to the fixated narrowness of social democracy or anarchism.
Bill insists that the BNP is “an instrument of civil war against the working class” and as such it is a movement that can be stopped by force and force alone. The first statement is nowadays worth questioning; the second is simply absurd.
In my first article I argued that even against bona fide “fascists”, if it was “correct and advantageous to our cause” then it would be perfectly proper for any Marxist organisation worth its salt to “go on the attack” and physically engage with them on the streets with fists, boots ... or AK47s. By the same measure it could be perfectly proper to engage in “debate”. It all depends on circumstances.
This is also true of non-fascist organisations, such as Ukip, the Tories or even the Labour Party - tactically nothing should be ruled out from the start.
Those who somehow go along with Bill’s idea that I underwent some sort of epiphany in the week between writing my two articles on the BNP by not defining it as fascist should take a look at a piece I wrote a year ago in Communist Student. Here I argued that terms like ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ should not be thrown around willy-nilly and that the BNP today “represents something qualitatively different” from the BNP of yesterday (www.communiststudents.org.uk/paper/002/fascism.html).
I have used the early 1920s KPD as an example. Not because I necessarily agree with its tactic of debating with the nationalist right in Germany, the fledgling National Socialist Workers Party included. But this episode at least shows that there is, and should in principle be, more than one string to our bow. After all, the KPD also had fighting formations and stood in elections at the time.
To dismiss any of these tactics as a principle is foolhardy. But at least comrade Bill has stopped banging on about our position being akin to Stalinist third periodism. Thank goodness for small mercies.
Nonetheless, the comrade clings to his definition of the BNP as “an instrument of civil war against the working class”. He claims it is demonstrably false that the BNP does not organise street fighting. Oldham and the attacks of 2001 are cited!
Yet, if he were to remove his dogmatic glasses for one second, it would become palpably clear to him that the strategy of the far right in Britain has changed dramatically, now focusing predominantly upon the ballot box. To refuse to see that is to disarm oneself and the working class movement.
Tactical flexibility precisely recognises that in politics things can change rapidly. It is quite feasible that the BNP could drop its populist agenda and revert back to the tactics of fighting for the streets, harassing the left, breaking up meetings, etc. This would of course necessitate another shift in our approach. But today we have to deal with things as they are, and adopt the appropriate tactics.
Does Bill think that the Tories or the Labour Party are consistent democrats? I don’t. Should we always seek to deny them a platform as a result of their fake democratic posturing? To ask the question is to answer it. Anybody who, out of whatever conviction, calls on us to always do this or always do that is in effect renouncing Marxism.
Apparently by asserting that it might not be the best idea to shout down or “kick the shit out of” some hapless old war veteran standing for election, but that better tactics might be to defeat his ideas and potentially win over thousands of voters, I have become a “liberal” and “pacifist” opponent of what Bill terms “militant anti-fascism”. This is pathetic and merely underlines the paucity of the comrade’s political perspective.
Permanent Revolution comrades, as they made clear at last year’s Communist University North, are convinced that even the possibility of talking alongside a BNP supporter in a radio debate, or in local elections hustings, is unacceptable. “Pull the plug!” is their political elixir. So comrade Bill has to dub a proponent of the workers’ militia a “pacifist” and a “liberal”.
More to the point, it is simply wrong to say that the “physical suppression of ideas” is working - look at the votes for the BNP! They are winning the political battle in certain communities, and this is not because there are not enough UAF stalls or people doing anti-BNP leafleting.
Comrade Bill reaches the conclusion that my take on all this amounts to “doing nothing against the Nazis.” He could not be more wrong. My position is that the left must organise on a different basis - one that takes democracy seriously both in wider society and within its own organisations. Without that, real thinking is impossible.
Nobody should know this better than comrade Bill himself. He was, after all, a victim of the “democratic centralism” of Workers Power – ‘democratic sectism’ in other words. We need to fight for the most open and frank exchange of views because only under these combative conditions can the truth be established. Simply repeating the majority line again and again is worse than useless.
Platform
Platform
Answer
“Do Weekly Worker readers think this strategy is reasonable, impossible, or both?” asks Tim Gee of an article by Justin Kenrick in the Scottish Left Review, which argues for a “Transitional Alliance ... to bring together a green focus on the exploitation and destruction of human and other ecologies with a socialist focus on the capitalist process” (Letters, January 31).
The premise of the article is to bring together reds and greens into an alliance or, in other words, that there should be no distinction, but a homogeneous group. Kenrick suggests the process would start with an alliance of transition communities based on long-term planning and sustainability, probably involving localised energy supply, going carbon-neutral, permaculture and other initiatives that many greens currently advocate. Furthermore, the philosophy would be cooperation, not competition.
Kenrick appears to think that a socialist solution to the suffering caused by capitalism is to increase production and distribution rather than recognise that the problem is the inequality of producing and consuming commodities. However, as I pointed out in my article on nuclear power, “what needs to be challenged is not only the specifics of nuclear power, but also the logic of capitalist expansionism - on the basis of real human needs” (‘Nuclear power irrationality’, January 17).
There are many activities in capitalist society that are unnecessary, such as car journeys, advertising and jobs that merely service capitalism. Dispensing with them would free up resources and labour to do useful work, which would not necessarily increase production. Kenrick does not say how he will provide for six billion people, apart from generalised statements about local transition communities ensuring our collective well-being.
Kenrick’s suggestion that we need to reconfigure what is socially possible and reclaim the political space is similar to Eugen Dühring’s proposal for economic communes. Kenrick has not clearly said if money is to be used in this transitional stage. During the transition stage there will continue to be capitalism, so what methods are to be used to stop individuals entering the capitalist world? And what is to stop the full force of the capitalist state knocking on the door of the transition communities during the critical moments when they face, as he calls it, the “barrage of threats from financial, media and state powers”?
Kenrick suggests we mirror the capitalists with our own forms of resistance, of media and mobilisation. It appears that he would revert back to some imagined community that never really existed, apart from the imagination of fiction writers. The answer to Tim Gee’s question is: ‘Impossible’.
Answer
Answer