Letters

Front

Once again there has been controversy over the image used on the Weekly Worker front page. This time it was not the ‘World’s No1 terrorist’ - Barack Obama. It was the savage treatment meted out to Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop the War Coalition. Peter Manson’s article said he was “small-minded” and referred to his “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit” and the front page gave this visual form.

Some readers loved it. One comrade even called it “genius” in an email. A single picture really can be worth a thousand words. On the other hand, there were those who hated it.

The image we composed was certainly not a work of genius. However, inspiration did come from an artist of the first order - John Heartfield (1891-1968). He changed his name in 1916 from Helmut Herzfeld - Anglicising it was a gesture of defiance in the face of the barrage of national chauvinist filth coming from the German authorities during World War I … and disgracefully added to by the right wing of social democracy.

Heartfield became a committed communist. He joined the newly formed Communist Party of Germany and contributed illustrations and poster images to two of its publications, Die Rote Fahne and Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Heartfield was a truly great photomontagist. His enduring style was first established while he was involved with the Dadaists - an international movement of radical anti-war artists who aggressively rejected both the values and aesthetics of bourgeois society.

I am sure readers of the Weekly Worker will know many of Heartfield’s wonderful images. We specifically drew from the 1929 picture book Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles put together by the leftwing satirist, Kurt Tucholsky (original copies are nowadays changing hands for $900). Heartfield designed the cover. A cut-and-paste black, red and yellow top-hatted German businessman-cum-steel-helmeted militarist belting forth the German national anthem.

The fact that members of the CPGB were likewise divided is not surprising. This reflects not only artistic, but political tastes and attitudes. Our Murray was a provocation. It was meant to upset opponents, even enrage them. Some don’t like doing that. Others do.

One comrade called our Murray image childish. This was supposed to be a put-down. In a sense, though, it is actually right. Dada is irreverent, mocking and often deliberately technically crude. Its adherents called their work ’anti-art’. The Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, memorably caused outrage in respectable artistic circles and bourgeois society at large when he exhibited his piece Fountain in 1917 - it was a urinal.

So our front page was absurdist, yes. Murray’s politics, especially on Hands Off the People of Iran, are absurd/ridiculous. Jules Martov famously recalled that the editors of Iskra - crucially Lenin, of course - strove to make sure that “all that is ridiculous appears in a ridiculous form” and “to expose the very embryo of a reactionary idea hidden behind a revolutionary phrase”. Today the Weekly Worker has exactly the same aim.

We were certainly right to lead on Murray’s role at the STWC annual conference and the vote to once again reject Hopi as an affiliate. This was the most important issue for us last week - and what a contrast it made to the banalities that normally feature on the front pages of the soporific left press.

The Murray picture - painted lips, small brain, crazy lettering - fitted the bill perfectly. Given the time restraints, our ‘head of design’ did very well in constructing the image. We often have to come up with a front page well into the night - on the basis of having read the contents of the paper.

Front
Front

Workers' Europe

Andrew Northall is living on another planet (Letters, April 30). The idea that ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ is internationalist, let alone socialist, reveals either confusion or wilful ignorance.

He thinks it is sectarian to point out that the basis of the campaign is the British road to socialism, a document in part drafted by Stalin that would be unrecognisable to even the likes of Eduard Bernstein as a socialist programme.

Northall forgets to mention that things like immigration controls are thoroughly reactionary and only lead to the fracturing of the working class. No2EU states openly that it is against the free movement of labour, which means that, when power has been ‘restored’ to plucky little Britain’s capitalist parliament, people seeking a decent life away from poverty, war and so on will be turned back at the gates. What kind of socialist or internationalist could be for deportations, detention centres and ‘Britain for the British’? Stalinists, bureaucrats and nationalists!

Peter Manson is absolutely correct to characterise this pile of shit as left nationalist (‘Split over No2EU’, April 23). There is only one way to stop the undercutting of wages, and that is working class unity across Europe. Our demands have to be positive. They have to be for the levelling up of wages and a decrease in hours so that unemployment is eradicated to ensure that the vast reserve of labour on this island or on the continent cannot be used to drive down our pay and conditions. All this should be ‘ABC’ to socialists.

Northall also ignores how the whole project was established - behind the backs of RMT members and the working class. He does not mention the immediate exclusion of the largest communist group in the country, the Socialist Workers Party, along with the CPGB and other “ultra-left” groups. By “ultra-left” Bob Crow and his co-thinkers mean internationalists.

The European Union does represent the organisation of “the major capitalist powers in Europe”. but it also represents a significant opportunity for the working class. Communists should challenge the state that they are faced with and, where the EU is becoming a quasi-state, we need to challenge it on a continental scale, not jump to the defence of capitalist Britain. In opposition to both a capitalist Europe and defence of the British state, we put forward a workers’ Europe from below. Instead of breaking up the working class of Europe into national parts, we should be fighting for unity - for a United States of Europe.

It is laughable that Northall can claim that “No2EU challenges the continued existence of a system that is run in the interests of a tiny parasitical minority”. Does he realise that such a parasitical minority also exists in the British parliament and state? Nowhere does the platform call for the advent of majority rule - ie, workers’ power. No2EU is not consistently opposed to bourgeois minority rule; it is for the continuation and strengthening of such a minority rule in Britain.

If comrades are in any doubt that the British capitalist state will be just as unfavourable to the working class as the EU, then they should remember that it is the British state, not the EU, that is blocking a maximum 48-hour week. It is the UK that has pushed through privatisation, cuts in services, cuts in pay and a sustained rolling back of the welfare state, not the EU. It is plainly bizarre that the workers’ movement should be defending such a state.

Comrade Northall goes on to say that it would be “wonderful” if we had one socialist party for Europe. I agree that it would be wonderful, but the fight for such a party does not begin by splitting up our class, by following national roads to socialism and absolutely not by tailing left bureaucrats.

The only way our class can ever achieve socialism in Europe is if it takes a lead in the struggle for democracy across the continent. In opposition to the bosses’ Europe, we must develop a positive programme for a Europe where democracy is expanded across all spheres of life so that we can begin laying the foundations for socialism.

Unlike the Stalinists and nationalists, communists are for the voluntary unity of people in the biggest state unit that is possible. The bigger the state, the easier it is for our class to struggle for socialism. There is no doubt that the CPGB formulation - “To the extent the EU becomes a state, that necessitates EU-wide trade unions and a Communist Party of the EU” - is needed more than ever.

Anyone confused about a communist approach to Europe would do well to read Jack Conrad’s book Remaking Europe.

Workers' Europe
Workers' Europe

No2EU disaster

On April 30 two members of Communist Students attended the Manchester launch of the left nationalist ‘No to EU, Yes to Democracy’ campaign.

The attendance was a paltry eight, and of those three were from the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, one from the Socialist Party in England and Wales, one from Permanent Revolution and a comrade from the Green Left. So out of eight in attendance four were hostile to the campaign.

The meeting began with an unwelcome discussion on its politics, with myself and other comrades taking the CPB to task for backing immigration controls, ‘British jobs for British workers’ and little Britain politics dressed up in trade union clothes. The comrade from SPEW seemed genuinely shocked when Dave Hawkins from the CPB proclaimed that immigration controls are a great British tradition and that British workers should be protected from immigrants coming over here and taking their jobs - it took but a second for the real politics of the campaign to come out. The CPB members present seemed stupidly unaware that muttering such sentiments did nothing to help the campaign and only encouraged and angered the small but hostile audience.

For over 45 minutes they were subjected to ridicule and the proper communist approach to Europe. To the credit of the SPEW member he did not engage in any abusive or arrogant remarks like the CPB members: he listened and discussed calmly, taking on the points that many comrades had raised. But still insisted that the positives outweighed the negatives in the campaign. It was a peculiar atmosphere considering CPB bureaucrats in Unison are witch-hunting socialist trade unionists who are SPEW members.

Further questions where raised about the establishment of the campaign and why it was done behind the backs of not just the RMT, but the entire movement. There was no democratic process or discussion within or outside the RMT. Unlike the PR and CPB members, everyone else thought that this was an important issue. The claim that the RMT membership is backing the bloc, when it has not discussed it or voted on it, has no basis in reality.

As the meeting went on, CPB members became more and more embarrassed, with Hawkins spending a good five minutes with his head in his hands. Hopefully he had just realised that Stalinism and its half-witted adherents will face opposition whenever they climb out of the safety of the trade union bureaucracy. Tempers did begin to fray and instead of discussing with the female comrade from the Green Left, Hawkins gave a sharp one-liner that ended in “love” - to which she replied, “‘Comrade’ would have been fine”.

So not only is the CPB happily promoting left nationalism: its members are also happy to be derogatory towards female comrades who are critical. Sexism has always been a part of this movement, and it is no surprise an old Stalinist is intent on perpetuating it.

The meeting was brought to an abrupt end when the CPB decided they would organise the campaign via email. They quickly ran out of the building, even forgetting to pay for the room. It was one of the most farcical launch meetings I have ever been to. Afterwards Hawkins admitted the launch had been a “fucking disaster”.

The CPB has been sending out plainly bizarre No2EU literature, using a list it seems to have pinched from the Convention of the Left. Several people have complained of receiving unwanted nationalist emails from a campaign that, it seems, very few people support.

Stalinists beware - internationalists are everywhere!

No2EU disaster
No2EU disaster

Europhobia

With reference to Peter Manson’s critique of Bob Crow’s so-called ‘leftwing’ nationalism (Weekly Worker April 2), I feel he should go a lot further along an internationalist line.

Crow’s capitalist allies in ‘Europhobia’ are making enormous headway amongst key components of what is left of the Labour and Liberal Democrat vote prior to the forthcoming European elections. Moreover, the UK Independence Party are not making any pretence at anything but old-fashioned, petty nationalist sovereignty. Still, Ukip well knows all they need is the expected low turnout under PR and above all supporters of wilfully gullible ‘left’ nationalists like Dave Nellist, the SP and Crow to cross-vote. Any anti-EU protest here in the UK will go to Ukip and the right, not the ‘left’.

By contrast to this stupid UK left nationalism, on a recent Paris trip I saw left forces effectively forming alliances premised on the sounder assumption that we have to practise solidarity across borders.

Europhobia
Europhobia

Taxing questions

Comrade Mike Macnair’s recent article on income taxation poses a number of questions (‘Budget: spinning, not turning’, April 30).

Firstly, out of all the allegedly “progressive” income tax systems, Britain’s is the worst - even worse than the United States’, for not having enough tax brackets.

Secondly, there is a twofold cultural advantage for businesses to “distribute profits in the form of salary rather than dividend”. During the upswing, it allows most of the rest of the “waged” and “salaried” folks to identify with the corporate executives (especially those of smaller companies) as being part of the “middle class”. During the downswing, it allows the ruling class to make a comprehensive assault on wages and salaries, using the cover of austerity and bourgeois equality.

Thirdly, with regard to tax havens, I’m surprised that the nationalist notion of “tax sovereignty” wasn’t attacked more vigorously in the article and that an EU income tax scheme wasn’t raised. Furthermore, the Erfurt programme, unlike the ‘transitional’ economism of either the Comintern or Trotskyist variety, called for “annual voting of taxes”.

It said there should be “socio-income democracy through direct proposals and rejections, at the national level and above, regarding all tax rates on all types of income - such as regular and management employment income, individual property income such as interest, both individual and corporate business income, both individual and corporate dividend income, and both individual and corporate capital gains - annual votes which include the right to create or raise upper tax rates, alternative minimum tax rates, transfer pricing tax rates, and non-employment income gross-ups or multipliers”.

Taxing questions
Taxing questions

Sri Lankan Trots

James Turley seems to be reverting to your ‘Leninist’ traditions of Trot-bashing (‘STWC fudges over genocide’, April 30).

I cannot believe that you are all unaware that the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was expelled from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International for its participation in a bourgeois-dominated and Sinhala-communalist coalition government way back in 1964. It is no longer a Trotskyist organisation in any meaningful sense and I don’t think it would claim to be one these days.

The two Sri Lankan Trotskyist organisations of which I am aware, the United Socialist Party (part of the Committee for a Workers’ International) and the Nava Sama Samaja Party (the USFI section), are completely opposed to the bourgeois communalist parties that have governed Sri Lanka in recent decades, and activists from both organisations have been targeted by government-sponsored death squads.

I came across an NSSP member who recognised me from an International Socialist Group-sponsored meeting a couple of years ago on the May Day march last week. He was marching with the Tamil contingent. In case you still don’t get the point, neither the USP nor the NSSP back the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, but their secular anti-communalist stance impels them to support the Tamil people against what increasingly looks like genocide rather than just a pogrom.

Sri Lankan Trots
Sri Lankan Trots