Letters
Gutter press
Your writers Vicky Thompson and Chris Strafford, in an article bizarrely entitled ‘“Socialists” and the lies they tell’, propagate an outrageous lie against George Galloway MP (May 1).
They write: “… at this point comrade [Adam] Lambert decided to defend Galloway, arguing that he actually has an impeccable record (let us ignore the small matter of voting against equalising the age of consent here) on LGBT rights ...”
This is a demonstrable lie. Galloway voted in favour of equalising the age of consent as early as 1994, long before current controversies about islamophobia emerged on the left and in society. He not only voted in favour of a proposal to equalise the age of consent at 16, he also voted against a weasel ‘compromise’ proposal to reduce the gay age of consent to 18, thus preserving inequality. He has never contradicted or repudiated these votes since and indeed has reaffirmed them.
Proof of this is contained in these two Hansard references: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199394/cmhansrd/1994-02-21/Debate-16.html (list of MPs who voted in favour of equalising age of consent, column 116); www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199394/cmhansrd/1994-02-21/Debate-23.html (those who voted against a motion to reduce the age of consent to 18).
How dare you accuse people of lying, while printing blatant, provable lies yourself! This is a scandalous piece of slander worthy of the gutter press.
Gutter press
Gutter press
In the egg
We read with interest the report of the April 19 aggregate of the CPGB, and in particular your resolution on fascism (‘Fascism and the left’, April 24).
You argue that the British National Party “cannot be classified as a fascist organisation” because “there are no fighting formations”. We also note that you declare yourselves to be “champions of democracy and free speech”.
Presumably this means you would attend debates with the BNP. The internal logic of your position is that you would defend meetings with BNP speakers exercising their ‘right to free speech’ against any no-platformist attempt to disrupt those meetings and stop the BNP from speaking.
Your opposition to a position of ‘no platform’ for fascist organisations is profoundly mistaken. The workers’ movement must indeed organise to crush fascism ‘in the egg’, if only to prepare ourselves for larger battles to come.
In the egg
In the egg
Fascism
A number of correspondents have written questioning the CPGB on fascism. Most simply take it for granted that the BNP is fascist. And, as fascists must be denied a platform, the BNP must be denied a platform.
But what none of them do is to provide a definition of fascism. Hence their argument is circular. There is no accounting for change, let alone discussion of flexible tactics. They are stuck in a no-platform rut of their own making.
The centrality of fighting formations is no invention. The CPGB definition of fascism comes from classic Marxism. It certainly dates back to Leon Trotsky in the 1930s.
There are those for whom this matters not a jot. But those who are serious about their Marxism are surely obliged to tell us what they mean by fascism.
Fascism is not simply being xenophobic, demagogic and getting votes on desperate council house estates. For Marxism it has a definite meaning which needs to be recovered from the misuse it has suffered at the hands of a left which has effectively sold its soul. Too many have brought into establishment history, World War II, Britain’s finest hour, the popular front and now the politics of multiculturalism and the liberal consensus.
The BNP is a foul organisation. That is beyond dispute. But it is only different from Ukip and the Tory Party by degree. And let us not forget. In the past fascism not only came from the right. It has come from the left too. Benito Mussolini edited the Socialist Party’s paper, Oswald Mosley was a Labour minister and Adolph Hitler’s party was called ‘national socialist’.
Fascism
Fascism
Bash the fash
Tami Peterson obviously has not got her head around the CPGB majority position on fascism and the BNP (Letters, May 1).
Firstly there is nothing to stop her approaching CPGB comrades for help with anti-BNP campaigning. Secondly because I do not regard the BNP as fascist that does not mean that I will not campaign against their racism, even if for me it is not such a high priority as for comrade Peterson - young blacks and Asians are more troubled by police harassment than by the BNP.
However, I am for working class unity against racism. This requires us to be very clear on why it is in the working class’s interest to defeat it, which means our class needs to know precisely what its enemies are saying. So censorship is not really the answer - at best it is a sop.
Thirdly, no-platforming the BNP clearly isn’t working. With the BNP standing in elections, the left either ends up no-platforming itself or earns a reputation for standing in the way of the democratic process.
Calling the BNP fascist is certainly not reducing its support. Yes, some members of the BNP would love to be fascists again, harking back to their old street-fighting days. But the BNP no longer organises fighting squads - the defining characteristic of a fascist party.
Most of the left can perceive of only one type of fascist: the Nazis, which in fact is the least likely form that fascism would take in Britain. Formations such as the Countryside Alliance are more likely candidates and others will certainly emerge - Oswald Mosley came out of the Labour Party, don’t forget. For any fascist group to pose a genuine threat it has to be predominantly respectable in its appeal - the thuggishness is portrayed as defensive action by good citizens taking matters into their own hands.
The BNP is chauvinist, racist and reactionary, but not fascist. What wins it public support is its promise to put an end to migrant labour. If you seriously want to defeat such divisiveness, then you must tackle the mainstream parties first and foremost. It is their British nationalist policies which continually reproduces the sentiment upon which the BNP thrives.
We need a different strategy. At present it is the main bourgeois parties and the state they all support, not the far right, that represents the greatest threat.
Bash the fash
Bash the fash
Numbers
Comrade Orestes at least makes an effort to engage (Letters, May 1). The week before we had a sad display of disengagement from Paul B Smith (April 24). Like a political idiot he took me to task for using the term ‘bureaucratic socialism’. That in the context of my listing how Karl Marx denounced ‘petty bourgeois socialism’, ‘military socialism’, ‘feudal socialism’, ‘bourgeois socialism’, ‘state socialism’, etc. These were forms of anti-socialism he commonly encountered.
Comrade Smith gave us a thumbnail lecture as to why I was so mistaken and Stalin’s system was not socialism. But, as I said exactly that myself, I am forced to conclude that comrade Smith’s letter probably had another agenda.
What of comrade Orestes? He rejects my definition of socialism (taken from a 1997 supplement). He also claims that my using a cold war warrior like Robert Conquest as a major source on the number of Stalin’s victims brings “discredit” to my work.
I say socialism is the first, lower, phase of communism. This is hardly original. I take it from Lenin, specifically his State and revolution pamphlet. I also follow in the footsteps of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme, where he clearly distinguishes the higher phase from the lower phrase of communism.
Conquest’s calculation is that some 10-20 million died because of Stalin and his system. This is dismissed as bad scholarship and a “cold war fabrication”. Our comrade from Greece wants to use more realistic figures (as provided by the American school of revisionist history). He comes up with around 600,000 deaths.
Even with hindsight I make no apology for using Conquest. He was in many ways a good, rigorous and accurate historian. That he was a “spy” and doubtless hated the left is for me a side issue. Comrade Orestes can call me “absurd” and “naive”. But recent scholarship has tended to confirm Conquest’s account. As to the revisionist school, it has been totally discredited.
The comrade finishes with a revealing flourish. Stalin and the bureaucracy, he says, cannot be blamed for “every single death that occurred anywhere in the Soviet Union”. But, as no-one would claim anything so obviously stupid, what is the point of attributing it to anyone, even by implication? Is it a smokescreen?
My fear is that comrade Orestes wants to constitute himself as an apologist for Stalin and bureaucratic socialism.
Numbers
Numbers
Good god
Is it not amazing that christians, in spite of their evil history over the last two thousand years, still have the hubris to maintain that there is a Judeo-christian tradition of “friendliness to the stranger”, as Henry Mitchell does in his letter (Weekly Worker April 24)?
It is shameful that, as Chris Stafford reports (Weekly Worker April 17), the Left List candidate commented that she would not have expected christians to offer a platform to the BNP. As Chris pointed out, “The christian church has been more likely to offer succour to the far right and fascist regimes than to oppose them”. This is indeed an historic fact.
Let us first consider some of the gains made by the working class over the last 150 years. These would include the abolition of slavery; votes for women; access to birth control and abortion; the (part) emancipation of women; access to divorce; equal opportunities legislation; and the acceptance of the individual’s right to a sexuality of his/her choice. All of these gains were made not because of the activities of christians, but in spite of them! Indeed at this very moment, the churches are - by and large - opposing the acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, female priests and many other progressive demands.
Henry Mitchell also needs to be reminded of the “friendliness to strangers” shown by the crusades and the inquisition; and that the present Vatican incumbent took up arms against socialism as a member of the Nazi Wehrmacht in the 1940s. We must add to this the support given by the christian churches to fascism in Italy, Portugal and Spain. Let us also remember the opposition to freedom for colonies, going back to North America in the 18th century, and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Then, of course, there is the matter of slavery - at best tolerated, at worst supported by the christian churches for 1,800 years!
With christian friendship like this, the strangers will certainly not need enemies!
Good god
Good god
Real world
Following on from Labour’s May 1 election meltdown, the CPGB (PCC) should now be making plans to stand candidates in the next general election.
The CPGB learnt many lessons from standing in four seats in the 1992 general election, and from standing in the 1999 European parliamentary elections. The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 means it would have to stand under the ‘Weekly Worker’ description on the ballot paper. That would present no problem, especially if the commercial printing of the Weekly Worker allowed the production of an improved hard copy to be sold on the doorsteps.
Standing candidates in the next general election, including using the hammer and sickle logo on the ballot paper, would put members in touch with the ‘real world’.
Real world
Real world
Balls-up
“Has a union witch-hunt reached into a campaign for solidarity with migrants?”, asks the Weekly Worker in its by-line to Gerry Downing’s article, which linked his failure to speak at the March 29 trade union and community conference against immigration controls to a longer standing witch-hunt against him (‘With the bureaucrats?’, April 17).
As the co-organiser of said event who, as Gerry mentions, invited him to speak at it, I think I can safely give the answer - no! That is not to deny the witch-hunt against him in other quarters, which he details in the second part of the article. But the fact that Gerry did not speak was the result of organisational failure. I think the technical term is a balls-up.
Readers might have gleaned as much from the number of people Gerry mentions that he spoke to before, at and after the conference in his attempt to understand the mess. However, I personally apologised to Gerry on behalf of the organising group when he called me after the conference, and the follow-up meeting accepted my version.
Of course, I am portrayed as an innocent party in the article, and blame is put on others. I don’t really accept this. I was the one who originally suggested moving him into the low pay workshop because other participants had failed to materialise. Other comrades, notably Dave Landau, insisted on keeping the transport workshop alive. But, as Gerry details, Dave’s attempts on the day to come up with a compromise only made things more confused. To read political manoeuvring into this is, I think, wrong. If I’d kept my mouth shut in the first place, then Gerry would have had his transport workshop, and he would have been the sole speaker and facilitator.
Yes, maybe we should have run around trying to find other participants for it on the day. But we were also worrying about the other 28-odd speakers/facilitators who turned up, and a heap of logistical issues we were confronted with on the day. Of course, if the event had had institutional trade union backing, as Gerry implies, maybe the whole thing would have run like clockwork. Maybe we would have had colour leaflets appearing months in advance and so forth. But the fact is we were an ad hoc alliance with the backing of a very small number of union branches and trades councils. The whole event was practically boycotted by the larger left groups (Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Communist Party of Britain). Region 1 of the T&G section of Unite refused in writing to support the event. And Anita Ceravalo of Justice for Cleaners came in a personal capacity. So no institutional union backing there either.
As further evidence, Gerry claims that the chair of the low pay workshop he attended did everything to try and stop him speaking, even from the floor. Firstly, if Gerry had sat with the speakers at the start of the low pay workshop, there would’ve been no problem with him being a speaker. Again, a case of confusion rather than ill intent. As it was, the chair didn’t know who he was, which undermines his further claim that the chair then tried to prevent him speaking from the floor. I heard Gerry’s contribution and it was a good one. If he was asked to wind up, it’s because a lot of people wanted to speak and there was extremely little time.
I hope Gerry will keep the speech he prepared as I am sure there will be further opportunities to use it. However, I wish he had used some of the space given him by the Weekly Worker to tell readers more about all aspects this under-reported event, at a time when migrant workers are being hit by workplace raids and the unions have no apparent will or strategy to deal with it. As it is, reports will be going up on our temporary website at www.29thmarch.org.uk and readers are invited to help take forward conference proposals by coming to the next meeting of the nascent Campaign Against Immigration Controls at 7pm on Tuesday May 20 at Transport House, 128 Theobalds Road, London.
Balls-up
Balls-up