Letters

National service

I have been concerned to read in the Weekly Worker continuous attacks on the idea of nationalisation over the clause four issue.

Though I agree that the Labour Party has never had a real commitment to public ownership, I do think nationalisation is worth defending even if clause four is not.

The principle of nationalisation is to provide services for the good of society rather than the profits of a few. Surely this is a socialist principle.

We have seen what privatisation has done to the coal industry, not to mention the other privatised utilities. But the prime example now must be the railways. It is obvious to everyone that a privatised rail ‘system’ will be total chaos. A nationalised service is the only way to provide an efficient rail service.

The Communist Party should become the champion of the nationalised railways even if the Labour Party cannot.

Tricia Harris
Newcastle

Fighting the cause

I have been pleased to see the Weekly Worker over the past few months fighting a lone battle exposing the Labour Party’s clause four.

The terminal weakness of the ‘hard left’ is exposed beautifully at this time. They are reduced to a totemic, sentimentalist defence of a clause which was specifically designed and inserted by ‘hard core’ anti-communists (ie, the Webbs) for the overt purpose of averting socialist revolution and ‘containing’ working class militants within the cage of the Labour Party, where they could be eventually neutralised (or Labourised).

What is also remarkable about the defenders of clause four is how defensive they are. Alex Falconer, MEP for Mid-Scotland and Fife, has snappily remarked that “common ownership” is not to be confused with “brute nationalisation”, and that “public control and public ownership have nothing to do with common ownership”. Tony Benn, ‘hard left’ stalwart, has also made the odd claim that “clause four is nothing to do with nationalisation - it is about common ownership”.

Now Marxists would agree that there is nothing inherently socialist, or even socialistic, about nationalisation (Engels talked about “a certain spurious socialism ... here and there degenerating into a kind of flunkeyism ... which without more ado declares all nationalisations ... to be socialistic”). However to imply that socialism has “nothing to do” with nationalisation is something else altogether and is the slippery slope to utter reformism.

The ‘irony’ of course is that thanks to the Labour Party ‘socialism’ has become largely identified with state, top-down nationalisation. It treats the working class as a purely passive spectator (at best) and leaves social and economic power firmly in the hands of the capitalist class.

Communists should utilise this latest Labour fuss to drive home the message that the Labour Party is and always has been committed heart and soul to capitalism - and historically clause four has been part of that Faustian commitment, rather than some socialist Holy Grail which will miraculously reappear one day to be claimed victoriously by the virtuous ‘hard left’ paladins.

John Dart
South London

Overstated

I feel that comrade Eddie Ford allowed his youthful enthusiasm for the Communist Party to get the better of him in last week’s paper (Weekly Worker 77, Letters). He is correct in stressing “that all genuine communists coalesce around the CPGB and its principles”, but his blanket condemnation of the rest of the left (and by implication most of its membership) was in my opinion a little overstated.

May I remind him that, for example, the Independent Communists and Open Polemic both sent delegates to our summer school in Catalonia last year, while I understand that the Communist Action Group sent its apologies for being unable to attend. The use of the expressions, “sordidly dishonest” and “pathological hatred for the Communist Party of Great Britain”, when referring to such organisations strikes me as being rather out of place in such circumstances.

The reforged CPGB will contain many hundreds of individuals who now give their support to small left groups, not to mention bigger organisations, such as Militant and the SWP. We are talking about sincere comrades who are genuinely seeking correct answers to honest questions.

We should resist the temptation to alienate or dismiss these elements when we know we can help them find those answers.

Ted Jaszynski
North London