Letters
John for Leader
You may remember that I was in touch with you just over a year ago. At the time, I was writing to you on behalf of John McDonnell MP’s campaign for the Labour leadership, a campaign in which I was very proud to have played a key role. I write to you today in a strictly personal capacity. I have not discussed this with John or his parliamentary office.
I am asking you to pledge your support for the letter below. Over the coming weeks, I will be collecting the names of a huge number of party activists, supporters, councillors, NEC members, PPCs, trade unionists and community workers and campaigners. The letter will be published in a national newspaper. Please state which CLP and/or trade union you are a member of and any relevant position you hold. You will be included in a personal capacity unless you state otherwise.
“As a range of Labour Party members, supporters, councillors, NEC representatives, trade unionists, activists, community workers and campaigners, we are concerned that the Labour Party currently faces a crisis from which it may not recover for a generation or more. We believe that the current disastrous situation has been caused by the continuation of unpopular New Labour policies that have alienated millions of our supporters right across the country.
“When Gordon Brown became leader of the Labour Party, we were denied a democratic debate on the future direction of the party. We believe that, if a leadership contest is to take place, there must be a range of candidates representing all wings of the party. So far all the potential successors mentioned have supported the very policies that have landed the party in its current predicament - such as the Iraq war, privatisation of our public services, pay cuts for public sector workers, attacks on civil liberties and failures to tackle a growing housing crisis and increasing inequality. We believe the current crisis is about policies, not personalities.
“We desperately need a candidate to stand who will promote policies supported by millions of our supporters across the country - such as fair pay for public sector workers, public ownership of our services, a progressive tax system, an emergency council housing programme and an independent foreign policy. We need someone who is not compromised by voting for the very policies that have alienated our supporters.
“John McDonnell is the only potential candidate with a consistent record, who has opposed all of New Labour’s unpopular policies, who has a coherent alternative policy vision and who has widespread support across the labour movement. We therefore urge John McDonnell to stand when there is a vacancy and for MPs to nominate him in order for party members and trade unionists to have a genuine debate and choice about the future of our party.”
Please distribute this letter far and wide and collect as many names as possible and send them too.p.jones@gmail.com. It would be appreciated if you could get in touch as soon as possible.
John for Leader
John for Leader
Challenge
May I remind James Turley and your readership of the challenge I laid down several weeks ago to define the term “virulent third-worldist strain of Stalinism” (Letters, May 29)?
Perhaps it has proved too difficult?
Challenge
Challenge
Checkable
Reading Mark Fischer’s account of how the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty seems unwilling to take account of political realities that don’t fit its world view (‘Courting controversy’, July 24) brought to mind comments made on Dave Osler’s blog by hapless AWL members in March this year.
Janine Booth in particular gave us a tiresome rendition of the lie that the Weekly Worker is “gossip” and questioned the veracity of our reporting. We were lectured that we should be “checking actual checkable facts before printing them”.
Of course, these accusations should be treated with contempt by Weekly Worker writers and, when the question was boiled down, it became clear that AWLers’ problem with the Weekly Worker was the political interpretation of the “facts”.
But, okay, let’s run with Janine’s methodology for one second. The “facts” are that two unions, the PCS and Aslef, voted to affiliate to Hands Off the People of Iran. This is easily checkable. But there is no acknowledgement of that from the AWL. Does Janine not think this is worthy of some protest from herself to the editorial team of the AWL’s paper, Solidarity? After all, this is somewhat worse than failing to check something or misinterpreting it. The “facts” have been omitted in the cause of deliberately misleading people.
In Janine’s words from March, such a “standard will really make for an informative, useful, educational journal widely respected amongst the working class. Not.”
I would ask Janine to write in and respond, but, like the most bigoted sectarians of the SWP, she tells comrades that she can no longer bring herself to read the Weekly Worker. Shame.
Checkable
Checkable
Illegitimate
I’m sorry Ross Bradshaw preferred to engage in nit-pickery rather than commenting upon my review of Mike Marqusee’s book If I am not for myself - journey of an anti-Zionist Jew (Letters, July 24). However, it’s obviously easier to make the odd facetious comment than deal with a subject seriously.
My reference to the book receiving “scant attention” referred not to the number of reviews, but the lack of discussion that it has stimulated. This is to be regretted, but the book’s political themes have made very little impact on the left or in wider circles. If Ross didn’t recite Hillel’s saying each year at Seder that’s fine and only goes to prove what I said: viz, there isn’t one, fixed, Jewish identity. Jewish religious rituals and customs differ worldwide. We did recite it!
Henry Mitchell’s screeching letter of criticism of my review in the same issue is probably a good example of what I meant by the political weaknesses of Marqusee’s book. Mitchell is a raving Zionist who decries the “notion of the responsibility of Israel for the violence conducted against it”, who denies that Israel is a “virulently racist and murderous state” and who even praises the racist hard-right New Labour MP, Dennis MacShane, and his Tory/Liberal All-Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism for conflating anti-Zionism and anti-semitism! This is the support that, as Lenin once remarked, a rope gives to a hanged man, and I doubt that Mike M wishes to be hanged just yet!
I certainly believe that Israel, like all colonial settler states, is illegitimate in comparison with normal bourgeois democratic states. It is a state whose purpose is the removal and ethnic cleansing of another people and thus fits into the same bracket as similar states in the past. However, like most Zionists Mitchell needs to erect a few straw men in order that he has something to attack.
Nowhere do I say that Zionism and fascism are equivalent. Of course, Israel was profoundly shaped by the Nazi and fascist movements in Europe, with their blood and soil racism, and this is reflected in the fact that the law of return, which gives me, but not Palestinians born in Israel, citizenship, is modelled on the Nuremberg laws of 1935. However, it is clearly the case that Israel is not a fascist state, but rather one in which the primary organisation of the Israeli Jewish working class, Histadrut, was used to build the state.
Mitchell’s references to Iran “threatening to wipe Israel off the map” and his rejection of Abram Leon’s classic The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation show exactly where he is coming from. My concern is with Palestinians whose homes are wiped off the map, who are threatened with ‘transfer’ and being rendered stateless - not the puerile fantasies of the supporters of a state which is the pampered child of American imperialism.
Illegitimate
Illegitimate
Third camp
Yassamine Mather claims that Hands Off the People of Iran is not ‘third campist’, but she can only do so by completely misinterpreting the term (Letters, July 24). She seems to consider third campists to be those who believe that “the overthrow of the Iranian regime by a US-Israeli attack will weaken islamist forces”. It would probably be more accurate to refer to such people as ‘first campists’ - ie, those who side with the imperialists as a supposed lesser evil. On the British left the AWL is the most prominent proponent of this rotten position.
Mather argues that if there is an attack on Iran by US or Israeli forces, communists should “continue to fight both sides”. This is clearly counterposed to the Iranian defencist position argued for by James Turley (‘Third campism is a stinking corpse’, July 17). What Mather proposes instead is a position of dual defeatism (to use Turley’s term).
Comrade Turley, and any other defencists in Hopi, who may have hoped that there was some substance to Mather’s hollow denunciations of ‘third campism’, should now know better. Unlike genuine Marxists, who are prepared to militarily bloc with the mullahs’ forces against any imperialist attack, Mather’s letter makes it unambiguously clear that Hopi will not take sides in the event of a US-Israeli assault on Iran.
Anyone with that position is squarely in the ‘third’ camp.
Third camp
Third camp
Ultra-leftism
Phil Kent’s report on the Campaign for a Marxist Party fringe meeting at Marxism highlights the negative influence played by Hillel Ticktin in any project aiming at revolutionary unity (‘Unwilling to engage’, July 10).
In attempting to appeal to ultra-leftist sentiments in his audience, Ticktin argues that ‘Stalinists’ should not be welcomed in any attempt to build a mass Marxist party because the ‘socialism in one country’ that they adhere to isnot Marxist.
This is not only a shibboleth brought forward by Ticktin to exclude those who he regards as disagreeable. The truth is that the ultra-left have never understood the tacticalimperative of socialism in one country as flowing from thestrategy of world revolution, which unfolds unevenly to one degree or another.
In other words, when it comes to the world revolution, ultra-leftists separate tactics from strategy, failing to see how one serves the other. The origins of this mistake, passed down to later generations, was Trotsky’s failure to grasp the dialectical relationship between socialism in one country and world revolution.
It was Lenin who was, to my knowledge, the first Russian Marxist to raise the possibility of socialism in one country as part of world revolution. However, the important thing is not to defend this idea because it comes from a leading intellectual authority: rather, in my view, the idea should be defended because it was the most realistic.
Just imagine Trotskyists preaching in blockaded Cuba that socialism in one country was impossible. This would be grist to the mill of imperialism, as would be the case if revolutionaries preached the same idea in relation to the democratic revolution in Venezuela, which will be overthrown by the old pro-imperialist elite if it fails to take steps towards socialism. What is stopping the right wing of the Venezuelan democratic revolution from arguing the same defeatist point as Trotsky did from the left in regard to the Soviet Union?
Much of the left needs to break from the Trotskyist myth that supporting socialism in one country makes you opposed to world revolution. Science is not about blindly upholding intellectual authorities because we cannot think for ourselves, but trying our best to ascertain the truth through honest debate. The final judge being the correct evaluation of experience.
Ticktin’s opposition to socialism in one country as a tactical imperative would retrospectively mean not only excluding Stalinists from the Marxist camp, but Lenin and Bukharin as well. It would in fact represent, from the standpoint of method, a victory of ultra-leftism over dialectics, or dogmatic ‘Marxism’ over real life.
Ultra-leftism
Ultra-leftism
Aghast
I was aghast to read Hillel Ticktin’s statement that “Nobody who supports socialism in one country is a Marxist. That includes those who supported the Soviet Union or today support China or Cuba ... That only leaves Trotskyists, then ... they were the only Marxists during the period of Stalinism and that remains the case down to the present day: there is nobody else” (‘Who are the Marxists?’, July 24).
As much as it is convenient for this esteemed academic and activist to do so, he cannot wish away the existence and history of the Socialist Party of Great Britain as the Marxist party that consistently exposed Stalin’s concept of socialism in one country to justify his state capitalist regime, when all the time, it may be added, Trotsky was busy playing the role of ‘loyal’ opposition: “Under the treacherous blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Left Opposition [ie, he and his followers] maintained its fidelity to the official party to the very end” (L Trotsky, ‘The tragedy of the German proletariat: the German workers will rise again - Stalinism, never!’, March 1933).
Needless to say, Ticktin’s blinkers to the SPGB’s anti-Stalinism can probably be explained by the fact that, although it condemned Stalin, the SPGB was not amiss in also presenting critiques of Lenin and Trotsky from a sound Marxist perspective - something that was very much unpalatable to Ticktin, methinks.
Aghast
Aghast
Desiccant
Dave Douglass (Letters, July 24) avoids my point that ifSocialist Worker were to address, for example, workers’ control of the mining industry, it would be clouded in a confection of economism (July 17). However, comrade Douglass is correct when he says I imagined the exchange between him and Socialist Worker. It is called theory of the mind and there are many examples of these exchanges within the pages of the papers I cited.
But we do not have to imagine any more, because he has done a better job in his reply than a party hack would write were they to address the issue of workers’ control. He writes that the National Union of Mineworkers is “a constitutionally anti-capitalist working class organisation ... with a vision of a socialist alternative to the current system” and a visionary union with a class perspective. He says that miners in Britain enjoyed the highest wages in the world, had by far the most safely produced coal in the world, mining was modern and efficient, and the NUM took part in global conferences to set an international coal production target and a base standard of terms, conditions and rules in solidarity.
Despite the NUM purporting to be anti-capitalist, the reality is that there is a gulf between what is written down and practice. At least the SWP can be credited when it says the Labour Party is finished, whereas the NUM is still wedded to the party of capitalism.
A trawl through the union struggles of the 20th century from the general strike of 1926 to the miners’ strike in 1984-85 shows the limits of union militancy. Thatcher knew that the real enemy is the organised working class with a body of theory behind it that will say what it intends to do and mean it.
Comrade Dave is naive to think that CO2 emissions can be reduced by 90% using clean coal technology - a contradiction in itself, given that the operative word is ‘clean’. I presume he is quoting the TUC/government/industry clean coal task group’s optimistic study of carbon capture and storage (CCS) referenced on the NUM website. It fails to mention that, although Kingsnorth’s coal-fired power station could be made CCS-ready, it would have reached the end of its useful life before the technology arrives (New Scientist March 27).
Comrade Douglass also fails to see the joke in my description of him as the “typical coal dictator”. Perhaps he forgot that in his original letter he described the majority at the Climate Camp as having no concept of class struggle and that this is typical of the green dictatorship who act as self-chosen saviours (July 10). I was agreeing with the points comrade Dave made about the Climate Camp.
But in opposition to the Climate Camp, the NUM will defend itself as a mineworkers’ union - rather like the SWP defends itself for its own existence. Just like Stalinism, the trade unionist road to human self-emancipation should be assigned to the history shelf as the desiccant of working class struggle.
Desiccant
Desiccant