Letters

Shirty

Last year, the Workers Party of New Zealand launched a solidarity campaign with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Central to the campaign is the raising of funds through the sale of pro-PFLP T-shirts. All profits from the T-shirts are sent to the PFLP.

The first T-shirt, launched last June, featured the slogan, ‘Resistance is not terrorism’, a Palestinian flag and the name of the PFLP. The $NZ1,000 profit from the first T-shirt was sent to the PFLP earlier this year.

This June, the second t-shirt has been launched. It features the PFLP name and a picture of Leila Khaled, one of the most well known leaders of the PFLP who shot to fame as a plane hijacker four decades ago. Leila sent us the message, “From Palestine with love - Leila Khaled”, in her own handwriting for this T-shirt.

You can order the T-shirts online at wpnz-pflp-solidarity.blogspot.com. The cost within New Zealand is $NZ30, plus $5 for packing and postage. Outside New Zealand the cost is $NZ30, plus $NZ15 packing and postage.

Shirty
Shirty

Victory

The acquittal of all seven activists charged with conspiring to cause criminal damage to an arms factory supplying components to Israel has been welcomed by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

These activists argued that they acted to stop Israel committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead last year. Having been presented with the evidence of Israel’s atrocities during that period, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed in three weeks and more than 5,000 injured, the jury had no option but to agree with them.

This result is a victory, not only for the seven protestors, but for the people of Gaza and of all Palestine who have suffered decades of brutal Israeli occupation. It sends out the message that it is not a crime to stand up for the human rights of Palestinians, and we hope that it will encourage more people across Britain to stand up and make their voices heard.

The PSC is participating in a global day of boycott action on July 9, called by Palestinian civil society. There is a growing movement to boycott Israeli goods, with civil society across the world sending a clear message that they will no longer economically aid Israel’s violations of international law and its war crimes. A boycott campaign was hugely effective in bringing about change in apartheid South Africa, and it can work in the struggle for justice for Palestine.

Victory
Victory

Socialist sexism

Regarding Dave Douglass’s latest response to my letters on sexism in this paper, I suggest his arguments might be more effective if they related to what I had actually said. At no point did I defend the arrest, prosecution and forced detention of two little boys. Nor did I describe voluntary child sexual exploration as rape. That would have been foolish.

I actually said that the state’s response to sexual violence is inadequate. I would extend that judgement to such cases as Raoul Moat, who was released after his sentence for assaulting a relative with warnings to the police that he planned to harm his ex-partner. They took no action; she is in hospital and her new partner is dead. The police were alerted many times by women and girls who identified Ian Huntley as a violent sexual predator. Their complaints were not sufficient for effective action to be taken; two girls are now dead. The women who identified the cab driver, Worboys, as a sexual predator were not believed, leaving him free to attack more women. Numerous research projects show that 20%-25% of women are subjected to sexual violence, around 5% of reported rapes resulting in conviction. Similar numbers experience domestic violence. We can conclude that violence against women is not effectively controlled by the British state.

It is worth considering what was actually said in the case of the two little boys and one little girl. When the girl’s mother went looking for her, she met the mother of the younger boy and she asked his five-year-old friend where her son was. The five-year-old answered that he was in a field with the girl and he was hurting her. The mother could see things were not right with her daughter, who said the two boys had used bins to trap her in a block of flats, then taken her to the field, though the girl told them to leave her alone. The girl’s mother asked the older boy what happened. He replied, “Nothing”. The younger boy then arrived and said, “I didn’t touch her”, without being asked about the incident. The older boy then added, “It wasn’t me. It was [the younger boy].” The girl also said one of the boys threw her scooter into a bush and said she would not get it back unless she did what they said.

Now, the question of whether the legislation under which the boys were prosecuted is useful, inadequate, repressive or anything else is one issue. The question of whether the situation described above is “a little girl engaged in a normal sexual game with two of her playmates” is quite another. It doesn’t look like “All three of them were voluntarily engaged in it. Nobody was forcing anyone to do anything” to me. While it is clearly inappropriate to put children, as defendants or complainants, through the stress of an Old Bailey trial, it does not follow that we should do nothing to protect children subjected to sexual bullying and coercion. Dave has previously told us of his own early joyful sexual experiences. I assume he would concede the possibility that others experiences may be less than joyful?

The rest of Dave’s letter again misrepresents what I actually said. For example, I did not “link the struggle of the suffragettes to the sexual repression of children”. I linked the sexism of ‘socialist’ men now to the sexism of ‘socialist’ men in the early 20th century.

We then reach the high point of Dave’s contribution when he returns to the well-worn theme of middle-class feminism, but this time with the addition of heterophobia (fear of heterosexuality) and misandry (hatred of men). It is a long time since anybody called me a man-hating lesbian. My original letter criticised the frequent reliance on sexist clichés by contributors to this paper. I am not surprised to see it has had no effect.

Socialist sexism
Socialist sexism

United front

The June 19 aggregate meeting of the CPGB, as reported by Peter Manson, was right to maintain the view that the Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party (‘The Labour Party and communist strategy’, June 24). Lenin also held this view, which I believe is still correct. Sectarian circles reject it, especially after the Blairites moved the party further to the right, although this did not change the essence of Labour. It remained essentially the same - a classic example of a bourgeois workers’ party, meaning a workers’ party with a bourgeois political line.

The Labour Party has always been dominated by the rightwing capitalist-roaders and the reason for this is that since the party’s formation capitalism has been in ascendancy, punctuated by recessions and a depression. This expansion and globalisation of capitalism in the 20th century was all made possible by supplies of cheap oil. As the rise of capitalism led to the domination of the capitalist-roaders in the party, we can expect that the decline of capitalism should lead to the rise of the socialist wing.

The ‘energy theory of society’ indicates that capitalism will be unable to overcome this present energy-related economic crisis and set itself on the path of recovery; growth will have come to an end, as we enter the declining second half of the oil age. This will lead to the collapse of free-market ideology and the loss of control of the right wing in the Labour Party. As the right loses their grip on the party and capitalism descends into permanent crisis, the choice facing the Labour Party will be either to break with capitalism or face complete dissolution.

If the party was to choose the former course, there are no laws of history which dictate that it cannot become the main vehicle for the transition to socialism in Britain. This will probably be some form of austerity socialism to begin with - far better than the barbarism and gang rule which will be the alternative to socialism, as the oil age slithers to an end and capitalism collapses.

As for the argument about propping up the Labour Party, my reply is that we are faced with a new paradigm. Never before has capitalism faced an energy-related economic decline, so it is useless dogma to say that the Labour Party will simply behave in the same old way, with the right remaining in control, pursuing an increasingly impossible capitalist road.

This leads me to argue that the best communist strategy towards the Labour Party is to maintain a flexible attitude. The CPGB has done well to ignore the siren calls from the dogmatists and sectarians for a new workers’ party when one already exists. These calls are a diversion which fails to recognise the real nature of the crisis and what this will mean for the Labour Party. The advocates of the new workers’ party are driven by emotions, not by a true understanding of the crisis and its permanent nature.

The real choice facing the left will be a united front with the Labour Party from within or from without. Interestingly, the left has nothing to lose from a united front within because, when the Labour Party moves to the left, we gain and, if the party fails to move left, we gain again. However, a successful united front policy from within would require the left to break from its dogmatic versions of Marxism and totalitarian and bureaucratic forms of socialism, and stop blaming Stalin for bureaucracy, instead viewing bureaucracy as a problem for the left in general, as the recent exclusion of the CPGB from the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition so amply demonstrates.

United front
United front

Sorted

I just would like to react briefly to the part of Mike Macnair’s article concerned with the use of sortition, or the drawing of lots, as a democratic instrument (‘Representation, not referendums’, July 1).

Let me say that I strongly support a greater role for sortition in our democracies even in the present state of development or in other phases such as a potential transition to socialism. Among the pros, I see gains in the following democratic vectors:

• direct/participatory - thousands or tens of thousands of citizens would take part in such institutions every year, acting as a school of democracy with widespread effects on the attitude of the citizenship (TV coverage would be needed to achieve this goal);
• representative - creating a new source of democratic legitimacy, representing non-organised interests and, thanks to its independent source, it would be able to countervail and check the power held by elected institutions, which are controlled by political parties; it would contribute to solve the old problem of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?;
• and deliberative - as debates would be more free, less bound to party instructions, which would help to open the agenda-setting function now controlled by parties and established power structures.

I also think that sortition compares favourably to other participative and direct democracy mechanisms (more prone to manipulation by established power structures and/or exposed to scale problems) and to internal democracy efforts by political parties, which are mostly doomed to failure due to the nature of political competition in elections.

Therefore, sortition should not only be regarded as an adequate tool for a communist phase but as a key instrument to overcome the oligopolistic predominance of majoritarian political parties (and their economic allies), both of the political agenda and the institutional functioning in the political realm. Hence, it is in the interest of the social and political left to favour and promote the use of sortition to fill political institutions so as to give the voice back to the common people and, with it, to the concerns and the objectives of the left, which I am confident (as almost an axiom) are more widely present in the minds and lives of common citizens than in the lives of privileged party nomenclatura who make it into elected and/or appointed political positions.

Finally, it might be noted that the use of sortition as a democratic tool is being proposed by an increasing number of scholars and political activists, such as Robert Dahl, Benjamin Barber, Yves Sintomer and John Burnheim, and it is also already present in more mainstream debates (eg www.economist.com/node/16056622?story_id=16056622).

Given the left’s democratic credentials and objectives, it would only be consistent to include sortition as one of the main tools in deepening the democratic character of our political institutions. A well informed source of information on sortition and democracy is equalitybylot.wordpress.com.

Sorted
Sorted

Eco-notions

Eddie Ford says that “Marxism is environmentalist to its very core” (‘Endlessly plundering the Earth’, July 1). That may well be true of Eddie Ford’s Marxism, but it certainly is not the case with the Marxism of Marx and Engels, whose ideas were nothing short of antithetical to those of modern environmentalism.

Marx and Engels argued over and again that mankind progresses by seeking to increase its mastery and control over its natural surroundings. They enthusiastically (though, of course, not uncritically) praised advances in science, industry and agriculture. They saw the globalisation of economic production as one of capitalism’s key achievements. They ridiculed and were disgusted by the overpopulation thesis of Malthus. They wanted to end the division between town and country - as Ford points out - because they saw that it was keeping the countryside backward and in “rural idiocy”. The urban town, despite all its problems under capitalism, pointed to the future, whereas the countryside reflected the past. They insisted that communism was possible only under conditions of material abundance, and their single most central indictment of capitalism was that it held back the development of humanity’s productive potential: capitalist relations of production become a fetter on the development of society’s means of production.

Eco-socialists like to point to the one or two remarks Marx made about soil erosion in their attempts to paint Marx green. But, in reality, Marx had no time at all for the environmentalists of his day who opposed modern agriculture: “modern natural science ... with modern industry, has revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man’s childish attitude towards nature ... [I]t would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish peasant economy ... should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines.”

If there are any significant environmentalist groups who agree with a single one of Marx’s and Engels’ positions (there must be if we are to believe the quote in the first sentence above), they must be invisible. The likely scenario is that such Marxism would fill almost every green with utter contempt. Environmentalism celebrates all the things Marxism opposes (localised economies, small-scaled production, population controls, ruralisation) and opposes all the things Marxism sees as quite positive (industrialisation, the creation of a world economy, urbanisation, modern agricultural methods).

None of this is to suggest that environmental problems do not exist. They do. But Marxists need to be clear that the solutions to these problems are to be found not in halting or slowing down development and adopting petty bourgeois eco-policies, but, actually, in creating a society in which development is a universal phenomenon (which, to his credit, Ford emphasises as a necessity), since, the more developed a society, the less vulnerable it tends to be to nature’s caprice and the more resources it tends to have to invest in cleaner and more efficient productive technologies. Industrial underdevelopment, something which environmentalists in effect promote, makes us defenceless against the destructive aspects of nature. Emphasising the need for more development has revolutionary implications, since capitalism is unable to meet this need.

The eco-notion that capitalism is flawed because it creates too much development(!) is, in contrast, entirely conservative and provides very convenient apologia for capitalism’s lack of dynamism and inability to meet human needs. That’s why it needs to be fought.

Eco-notions
Eco-notions