Letters
Let them all on
James Turley’s article denouncing Dianne Abbott’s attempt to stand for Labour leader was misjudged and replicates the worst elements of the response to her candidature from the left (‘Diane Abbott splits left’, May 27).
Instead of attacking her move as a way to undermine the left challenge, or implying that she is being manipulated, we should state that all of the candidates should get on the ballot paper and that the undemocratic process must be overhauled completely. To his credit, John McDonnell is arguing for that and, out of principle, welcomed Abbott’s candidature. So should we. The fight in the Labour Party over the leadership election has to be focused on democracy and pluralism.
Let them all on
Let them all on
Nauseating
This really is a laugh coming from you lot (‘SWP stunt backfires’, May 27). Or it would be, were it not for the fact that it is typical of your ‘attack the SWP’ antics.
We remember the glee with which Mark Fischer wheeled Michael Crick round on Newsnight during the split in Respect - which you were part of at the time. No, for the most obsequious publicity-seeking, you are the champions - and nauseatingly hypocritical and pompous with it.
Nauseating
Nauseating
Back to drachma
Enso White argues the Greeks cannot break away from the euro, as this will lead to it becoming like Albania (Letters, May 27). Media commentators have argued that, if the Greeks push it too far, a new set of colonels will return. In other words, one first has to wait for the revolution in the UK to break out before resistance and clear demands are placed to the mass movement to cancel the foreign debts and return to the drachma.
Bankruptcy is here in the form of the EU-IMF agenda, which has a two-pronged strategy: to create a depression (GDP collapse in the region of 10%-20%) and to break Greece apart, so that it becomes a region of the EU without a national parliament, national budgets or national decision-making (the Kallikratis plan). All will be controlled from Brussels by some new Euro-gauleiter (‘commissioner’ is the latest version of the name).
The Greek resistance to Hitler’s occupation didn’t wait for the resistance in France or Italy. Resistance occurs whether one likes it or not. The issue is whether one is able to channel it in a proper direction, not allege that if you resist and leave the EU you will become Albania. That isn’t an argument, because in recent years Zimbabwe has resisted. So has Iran, so has Cuba and so has Venezuela. They are still standing.
Arthur Lawrence, on the other hand, argues that local struggles cannot break the stranglehold of the most extreme form of EU-IMF dictat, as that would lead to trade wars and barriers - another form of protectionism. So we have to put up with them. This is precisely the strategy of the Greek left in its attempt to prop up the EU-IMF measures. They gathered thousands on the demos but, when a section of the demo tried to storm parliament, the KKE, in its traditional style, condemned the protestors as fascist provocateurs. Exactly what they did in 1973 with the polytechnic uprising and in 1944 with the murder of the guerrilla leader Velouhiotis.
Lenin argued that a capitalist united states of Europe was unrealisable or that it would be reactionary. The euro is dead. It hasn’t withstood the test of the crisis. We are just waiting for the funeral to be announced. But it is coming, as day follows night - just like the whole Euro project of integrating the industrial north with the poorer, non-industrial south. Greece has paid $500 billion in interest payments alone in the last decade or so and buys up $7.5 billion in arms annually from the northern Europeans. It now has some of the highest prices, some of the lowest per capita wages and the highest VAT rates, thanks to the EU. The EU is a bosses’ racket, but they can keep it. We don’t want it.
Next time round, the organised forces of the left will not be able to contain mass anger, as the economic crisis isn’t going on vacation. An Argentinian-style popular explosion is on the cards. The Argentinian masses broke dollarisation, restored their currency and introduced import controls to defend national production. Any organisation that doesn’t have them as their example is pro-globalist and pro-new world order, pure and simple. You will find yourselves directly in conflict with the mass struggles in Greece, just like the KKE has started to be.
Back to drachma
Back to drachma
Holding lines
Tina Becker’s article on Die Linke (‘Key debates evaded’, May 27) reminds me of one of the comments that comrade Mike Macnair posted on the Socialist Unity website about the nuances of coalition governments. Despite his statement in his book Revolutionary strategy that he is also against out-of-cabinet confidence ‘support’, he made nuanced statements about:
1. regional or local ‘support’ versus cabinet coalitions;
2. national (or above) ‘support’ versus cabinet coalitions (with so-called ‘national security’ on the agenda).
Could Mike please write something about all these nuances and how they relate to the Marxist minimum programme (legislative-executive combination, average skilled worker’s wage, recallability of all officials, workers’ militias and other freedoms of class-struggle assembly and association, media democracy, suppression of debts, nationalisation of banks, plus lots of domestic capital controls and so on)? In other words, what are the appropriate tactics?
I would also like him to write about how to avoid what became of something like, say, the social-corporatist New Democratic Party in Canada - now a Blairite formation without ever having entered into cabinet coalitions with the Liberals (providing at best ‘support’ in Liberal minority governments, such as the implementation of Tommy Douglas’s public health insurance idea).
Holding lines
Holding lines
UCU for boycott
The University and College Union, representing approximately 120,000 teaching and related staff in colleges and universities in the UK, has passed new policies supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The debate took place on Sunday May 30 at the union’s congress in Manchester.
Motion 30, proposed by the national executive committee, condemned “the failure of the international community to confront the Israeli government over the humanitarian disaster it is continuing to perpetrate in Gaza and the continued development of illegal settlements in the West Bank”, voted to work more closely with its Palestinian sister trade union (PFUUPE), and committed the union to working with bodies, including the Scottish TUC, Amnesty International and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to support the TUC’s 2009 congress decisions. The TUC voted to end arms sales to Israel, seek an EU ban on settlement goods and support suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement, which provides preferential trade facilities.
More strongly worded motions were to come. Motion 31, from the University of Brighton Grand Parade branch, agreed to establish an annual international conference on BDS, and “to sever all relations with Histadrut, and to urge other trade unions and bodies to do likewise”, as well as campaigning actively against the EU-Israel association agreement. Tom Hickey, proposing the motion, pointed out that the Histadrut had supported the Israeli assault on civilians in Gaza in January 2009, and did not deserve the name of ‘trade union organisation’. An amendment to this motion, seeking instead to “form a committee which represents all views within UCU to review relations with the Histadrut” and report back in a year’s time, was resoundingly defeated.
Motion 32 committed UCU to commencing the investigatory process associated with the imposition of a boycott of Ariel College. This is an institution in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, also known as the ‘College of Judea and Samaria’, which has long drawn the wrath of human rights campaigners because such settlements are illegal under international law.
Lastly, motion 33 from Oxford University branch, which criticised a South African trade union official who had been invited by UCU to a BDS conference last year, was defeated. Bongani Masuku, the international secretary of Cosatu, had been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks at a rally at the University of the Witwatersrand in March 2009. Mike Cushman of the London School of Economics told congress that Masuku had vigorously denied all such allegations and was fighting them in the courts and through the appeals process of the South African human rights commission. Cushman said that the real racists were those who had tried to provoke Masuku with insults about “the monkeys in Cosatu” dying of Aids.
The British Committee for Universities of Palestine welcomes the UCU decisions and will continue to campaign within trade unions in the UK for boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel until the occupation is ended and Palestinian people have justice.
UCU for boycott
UCU for boycott
Moscow Gay Pride
Thirty Russian lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists foiled the police and FSB security services by holding a 10-minute flashmob Gay Pride march on one of Moscow’s major thoroughfares, Leningradsky Street, on Saturday May 29. Carrying a 20-metre-long rainbow flag and placards in Russian and English calling for “Rights for gays”, the protesters chanted “No homophobia” and “Russia without homophobes”.
The guerrilla-style hit-and-run Moscow Gay Pride march was over before the police arrived. When they turned up, officers scurried around aimlessly, searching for protesters to arrest. All escaped the police dragnet. All morning the Gay Pride organisers fed the police a steady stream of false information, via blogs and websites, concerning the location of the parade. They suggested that it would take place outside the EU commission’s offices. As a result, the police put the whole area in total lockdown, closing nearby streets and metro stations, in a bid to prevent protesters assembling there.
This was the fifth Moscow Gay Pride and the first one with no arrests and bashings. It was also the first time activists succeeded in staging an uninterrupted parade. The Russian gay activists have won a big political and moral victory. They staged their Gay Pride march, despite it being banned by the mayor and the judges, and despite the draconian efforts by the police and FSB security services to prevent it from taking place. I pay tribute to the courage and ingenuity of the Russian gay and lesbian activists. They outwitted the mayor and his police henchmen.
Today’s events felt like steeping back into the Soviet era, when protests were routinely banned and suppressed. It is madness that Russian gay rights campaigners are being treated as criminals, just like dissidents in the period of communist dictatorship. The real criminals are not the peaceful Gay Pride protesters, but the Moscow mayor and judges, who banned this protest. They are the law-breakers. They should be put on trial for violating the Russian constitution.
It is the latest of many suppressions of civil liberties that happen in supposedly democratic Russia. Many other protests are also denied and repressed, not just gay ones. Autocracy rules under president Medvedev and prime minister Putin. This is much bigger than a gay rights issue. We are defending the right to protest of all Russians - gay and straight.
The EU, US and UK governments have shamefully failed to condemn the banning of Moscow Gay Pride. They support Gay Pride events in Poland and Latvia, but not in Moscow. Why the double standards? Western ambassadors to Russia offered no support to the Moscow Gay Pride organisers. They ignored suggestions that they host Gay Pride events in their embassy grounds and that they fly the gay rainbow flag on Moscow Pride day.
The courage and resolve of the Russian LGBT activists is inspiring. They were ready to take whatever brutality the police threw at them.
Moscow Gay Pride
Moscow Gay Pride
New network
I am writing to invite your organisation to an inaugural meeting of progressive, community and socialist political parties in Rugby on Saturday July 24 2010.
The meeting is invitation-only. It is suggested that the conduct of the meeting shall be by consensus, but, should the conference decide to vote on an issue, each registered political party will have one vote each. If your organisation would like to suggest inviting additional established organisations, please feel to contact the convenors. At the time of writing, the conference has been endorsed by the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Rugby Red Green Alliance, the Left Unity Liaison Committee, the Wellingborough Socialists, the Socialist Alliance, the Barrow Socialist People’s Party and Lewisham People Before Profit.
Additional organisations that will be invited include Respect, CPGB, Kidderminster Health Concern, Cambridge Socialists, the Green Left, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party, Workers Power, Revolutionary Democratic Group, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, United Socialist Party, Walsall Democratic Labour Party, Convention of the Left, International Socialist Group, People’s Voice (Wales) and the RMT union. The convenors are happy to include other organisations that see the need for a left alternative to the Labour Party.
Across the country a variety and range of regional, local and borough political parties have been established in recent years to defend local services, support workers in struggle, defend the NHS or unite community campaigners to mount a challenge to the established mainstream political parties. For example, the Wigan-based Community Action Party gained more than 11,000 votes in this year’s local elections. The Lewisham People before Profit party gained almost 6,000 for its mayoral candidate and a combined total of almost 14,000 votes for its 23 candidates.
Since the general election, there has been the formation of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition government committed to £6 billion of cuts to public services and jobs. The need to assist and support all those coming together to defend services and jobs is therefore urgent.
The purpose of the meeting is to share good practice, network with each other and discuss the establishment of a national network body of regional and local parties with a representative from each affiliated organisation. A suggested working title is the ‘National Network of Progressive and Socialist Parties’ (NNPSP). Feel free to bring along samples of your party’s campaigning material, leaflets, etc.
Tasks that the national network body could seek to undertake could be to establish a website, disseminate literature and campaign information, investigate the possibly of a quarterly journal, organise an annual conference, help organise regional conferences, direct supporters to help out in by-elections, and represent nationally affiliated members. An additional and important area in the coming period could be to feed into any discussions on the formation of a new party of the left.
If your organisation would like more information about the planned conference, suggested aims, or would like to raise an agenda item, feel free to contact either myself as one of the acting joint convenors or Pete McLaren.
I look forward to hearing from you.
New network
New network