Letters

Nazi EDL

Today, in fairly tranquil Exmouth, I encountered a member of the English Defence League. He was harassing a young woman who was on the same train home as me. He was ranting about paedophiles and “Polacks” at her. He got on his mobile and started talking to someone. He continued his ranting about how “the EDL will sort it out”.

Apparently, “the Polacks” had made him late leaving work. He said he could hear the gas coming for “the Polacks” and made hissing noises. Polish people are not renowned for being jihadists. This guy is obviously a racist and has Nazi beliefs. The EDL are attracting, maybe even forming, neo-Nazis. As such, there should be a no-platform position against them.

I work with a lot of foreign workers in my job, most of them from eastern Europe and former bits of the USSR. Where the chains are forged is where we need to break them. And that means the workplace. There are battles ahead with the EDL. They should be opposed both on the streets and the workplace. The workplace is easier, in my opinion, because all the foreign workers I work with are good, solid working class people, who happen to have ended up in a different country to their own.

I suppose street protests give EDL supporters strength because they see others like them, and feel some sort of cohesiveness or solidarity when they get together. These demonstrations must be opposed by as many people as possible. We need to stop all this sectarian stuff about Unite Against Fascism saying this or that. We are the left, and we need to protect ourselves and ideas.

We need to respect differences between organisations, but unite against the common enemy. If we don’t, we’ll end up looking like navel-gazing fools trying to outdo each other. I think the CPGB is guilty of that, as is the SWP and others.

Nazi EDL
Nazi EDL

Double-think

More than once I have read articles in the Weekly Worker that use the word ‘schizophrenic’ to describe persons holding contradictory views. This error is not confined to your writers: it is appearing more frequently in the wider media. Holding contradictory views is not part of the criteria doctors use to diagnose schizophrenia.

While people with the illness can construct bizarre delusions, they usually have a consistent, non-contradictory internal logic. The most apt description would be ‘exercising double-think’.

Double-think
Double-think

Big Co-op

I can’t express how much I agree with, and welcome, James Turley’s article (‘Old cuts, new packaging’, July 22).

The reality is that Cameron’s Big Society is a big con. But the danger has been - and remains, as far as some in the Labour Party and other parts of the left are concerned - that the response would be to agree with Thatcher that “There is no such thing as society”, to suggest that if the capitalist state doesn’t do these things, then they cannot happen. Of course, in the first instance, some things like the NHS cannot be provided other than by the state, now that it has taken on that role - though there are cooperative pharmacies, some cooperative GP facilities and even a hospital that has been handed over to its workers on the John Lewis model.

In the first instance, the task must be to oppose privatisation and cuts, whilst demanding greater democratic control - by the workers in the particular service and the workers who are recipients of that service. But, as James says, we should be able to offer workers a better vision than that, and even within these immediate struggles we have to point out exactly why it is that such struggles have to be fought and refought every so many years - that is, so long as they remain in the ownership of the capitalist state, we never can have effective democratic control over them, any more than we can have control over any other capitalist property.

But, at a different level we can go beyond that, and we should use the space Cameron has opened up on this - just as we should use the space opened up for a discussion about bourgeois democracy to push that debate beyond the bounds the Liberal-Tories want to set - to propose practical alternatives to either ownership and control by the capitalist state or privatisation or the Big Society nonsense.

Cameron wants to shuffle off existing state provision to a rag-tag of voluntary organisations. Far from being some kind of “small state” proposal, it is, as James suggests, the very opposite. This will be a completely top-down process. It is the capitalist state which will determine which ‘voluntary’ organisation qualifies, it will be that state which determines how much those organisations will be allowed to spend. As James says, to carry out that function will require yet another tier of state bureaucracy.

It will not be local communities who will determine who should provide these services, nor what level of quality, or level of expenditure they want to make. It will not be local communities that commission the services, or which collect the funds to pay for them. That will remain firmly in the hands of the capitalist state. In fact, it will be a bit like Tesco, which determines what products it will put on its shelves, and uses its massive position to dictate to its suppliers what prices it will pay for them. And, just as that process allows Tesco to transfer surplus value from the firms producing those products to its own account, so the state will continue to expand, will continue to demand more and more tax from workers and the middle classes, but will have the ability to then restrict how much it pays out to these service providers, diverting the rest to its own desired activities.

I’m reminded of the situation at the beginning of the last century described by Kautsky. He wrote: “As regards the attitude of the party towards cooperative societies, the practical advantages … are so great that the opposition which they have met in the ranks of the social democrats is not at first sight to be understood. This, however, explains itself, when one remembers that the private cooperative societies were recommended to the working class by the liberals to tempt them from the founding of an independent political party, and from the acceptance of socialist ideas.” But, he says, the liberals did not get what they wanted.

We cannot define our politics by simply opposing the Tories, but only by developing our own agenda. At a local level we already have organisations such as tenants and residents associations, we have credit unions, we have former council housing estates that have been taken over by workers and transformed into cooperative housing. As opposed to the £80 million the Tories talk of in the Big Society bank, the Co-op Bank, following the merger with Britannia, has £75 billion in assets, whereas workers’ pension funds now amount to over £800 billion.

A movement from the ground up by workers within their communities could, given the support of activists within the co-op movement, with the support of the trade unions and Labour Party, put forward credible alternatives for real workers’ ownership and control of many functions decentralised to local communities, and backed by the significant financial resources that already exist, as set out above. Of course, that would involve a simultaneous struggle to ensure that the resources of the co-op were under the kind of democratic control that would make them available for the kind of development suggested, and even more a struggle to demand that the money in workers’ pension funds be taken out of the hands of the finance houses and placed under the democratic control of workers through the trade unions, and invested through the Co-op Bank.

As James says, we know, and certainly workers know, that provision by the capitalist state is bureaucratic and inefficient. What is more, the workers in the public sector know what Kautsky also spelled out: “If the modern state nationalises certain industries, it does not do so for the purpose of restricting capitalist exploitation, but for the purpose of protecting the capitalist system and establishing it upon a firmer basis, or for the purpose of itself taking a hand in the exploitation of labour, increasing its own revenues, and thereby reducing the contributions for its own support which it would otherwise have to impose upon the capitalist class. As an exploiter of labour, the state is superior to any private capitalist. Besides the economic power of the capitalists, it can also bring to bear upon the exploited classes the political power which it already wields.”

As such it can act to demoralise its workers even more than a private capitalist. If we really want to mobilise those workers, and those who depend on the services they provide, we have to offer more than just a simple defence of the status quo. Unfortunately, the trade union bureaucracy has a vested interest in doing precisely that. Its continued existence depends on being able to continue to act as a middle man between capital and labour. It’s no wonder the trade union dialogue has been framed purely around the question of protection of jobs, or maintenance of existing pay and conditions: ie, purely in economistic terms, rather than in the wider political terms of the common interests of producers and consumers of these services, and the wider class issues surrounding the issue of breaking the capital-labour relationship by taking ownership of these services out of the hands of the state.

Marxists have an important function here in ensuring that a wider political dialogue is established, which raises these questions of ownership, and in doing so offers workers a vision of a new type of society, but which at the same time provides them with a practical solution to their immediate needs.

Big Co-op
Big Co-op

Against freedom

Unfortunately your arguments concerning the vote in the French national assembly on the burqa was incorrect in identifying Daniel Garrigue as a member of the rightwing UMP.

He resigned from the group in December 2008. His current role as president of the Groupe d’Amitié France-Irak and previously as vice-president of the study group for Palestine in the national assembly shows that he at least has some understanding of the Islamic world. However, he made clear in an interview that he was simply voting against the text of the law. He was, he said, “favourable - and I have put down several amendments to this effect - to a limited ban in certain situations, in certain places, where security demands the power to identify people”.

Your denunciation of the PCF is also wide of the mark. You appear not to have read or listened to the arguments of Marie-George Buffet, national secretary of the PCF, whose consistent stand against such a law was made clear in her interview with TV5 Monde - Je suis contre une loi sur la burqa (‘I am against a law on the burqa’, January 27).

Her speech in the debate on the law on conspicuous religious symbols in 2006 was not that far removed from your own stance, once we consider the practicalities of such a ban and the dangerous implications for an increasingly divided society and growing repression by the state power: “Your law won’t work - it will increase sterile tensions without offering any progressive solutions.”

The greatest omission in your analysis, however, was that it had an inadequate appreciation of the concept of la laïcité (secularism), something that means more than simply the separation of the church and state. Even the PCF deputy who voted for the ban, André Gerin, argued: “Our mission is not to demonise Islam. Far from it. We have to respond to a fundamental question: how best to integrate this religion into the heart of the French republic?”

For the left in France, then, the issue is more about how best to integrate Islam into French society than an expression of Islamophobia. La laïcité is a struggle against the separatism and privilege of any religion and a recognition that the ‘freedom’ of a few fanatical believers renders immense assistance to the far right in their demonisation of all Muslims.

Against freedom
Against freedom

Here's an idea

Peter Manson states: “In actual fact the left’s ‘secularism’ is an impostor. Secularism demands not state bans, but state non-interference in the citizen’s religious or non-religious beliefs and practices. The state must not accord privileges to a particular religion (as in the UK with the Church of England) nor discriminate against others.”

At some point the question of state interference simply, simply has to be posed. The long and the short, starting with the short: I would like to see the conversion of all buildings of organised religion into intercultural community centres. Worship and prayer services can still be conducted in these buildings, but the scheduling of events should be done on a secular basis.

The long: total freedom of religious propaganda isn’t a good thing, since the most extreme of this would tolerate death cults or money-scamming cults like scientology (rightfully monitored by Germany’s security services, mind you). We shouldn’t be against “religious worship and anti-religious propaganda”, to quote Soviet constitutional documents, but the public display of religious symbols needs to be curtailed, whether they come in the form of saintly statues or burqas.

So, in between liberal secularism and the politically immature Society of the Godless of 1925-47 (with its public destruction of churches in the early 30s), I pose the conversion of all buildings of organised religion, from the Vatican and Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram to more local temples, into intercultural community centres. Various religious groups scheduling their worship and/or prayer services would be forced to engage one another culturally - hence the interculturalism and not multiculturalism - thereby promoting real religious diversity. Articles of worship and/or prayer could be kept in various storage rooms within the community centres, to be brought out during appropriate services.

Hopefully this potentially programmatic demand would make a huge dent in the megachurch business phenomenon, itself a display of unequal access to mass media.

Here's an idea
Here's an idea

White rights

Peter Manson’s piece on secularism - essentially a defence of the wearing of the burqa and niqab - didn’t go far enough to my mind. It comes over as highly weighted in defence of these two symbols of male chauvinism and female repression.

Let’s be right - they have nothing whatever to do with religion. They have nothing whatever to do with Islam as such, and any Islamic scholar will tell you as much. This is a dress code imposed from the start on women, and in so far as some women today may ‘choose’ to wear it, it is a choice which is of the same nature of battered wives who stay with their husbands, or slaves who side with their masters.

Still, being libertarians, we can only demand the right of people to wear what they wish, even if that means causing offence - and deliberately causing offence, as these garments often do and are intended to do. They are a statement of non-integration, a statement of separation. Nobody who wears them is ignorant of the hostility they create, but we defend their right to be offensive.

But let’s go beyond that. Do the English Defence League have the same ‘right’ to wear St George’s masks on demos, or folk to dress up in fancy dress Gestapo uniforms, or far-right idiots to march under the hood of the KKK? It would follow from defence of the niqab they must and we must defend their right to do so. What if I choose to wear the niqab, as a white, non-Muslim bloke? The truth is, in all three of these last cases I would be arrested for causing public offence, for conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace, for racial hatred, etc.

Some bits of cloth, like those who wear them, are more equal and more protected than others, and that’s what makes the left look like such screaming hypocrites in the eyes of many working class folk when we don’t point up the double standards. It follows a decade of Islamic codes imposed on majority non-Muslim communities, non-observance of religious and cultural holidays which don’t happen to include Muslims, the removal of food off the menu at schools which isn’t halal, and forcing the majority population to conform to rules and codes acceptable to Muslims.

Those are facts, comrades. We choose to shut up about it, not mention and even support it, because we are scared shitless of being labelled ‘racialist’. The conclusion which many working people draw is that the left isn’t interested in equality, isn’t interested in defending common justice and fair play for everyone: just minorities. I know I’ll be howled down for this, in this paper at least, but I know and you know, I’d be supported on any street in the country, in any bar, in any workplace, and I’d be right.

Until we start telling the whole truth, and seeing fairness and fair play as extending to white workers too, we will have no dialogue with anyone but ourselves.

The right to cause offence. The right for free speech. The right for an open debate.

White rights
White rights

Religious rights

Unlike most of the British liberal left, Peter Manson does not start from the absurd premise that the full-body veil is “empowering” (‘French burqa ban has nothing to do with women’s rights’, July 22). Religious practice is, for the comrades of the CPGB Provisional Central Committee, defined in a secular way. That is, it is not the business of the public authority to define what people should believe, or how they should carry out the obligations of their faith. That is the principle of non-interference in individuals’ religious activities.

This is a good starting point. However, its limits are pretty great. Peter Manson goes seriously wrong on a number of counts.

To begin with he states: “We demand that women have the right to wear the hijab, the burqa or the niqab.” But he goes on: “I would not for a moment wish to understate the dehumanising effect of imposing the burqa. It reinforces the notion that women may not assert themselves on an equal basis to men; that they should be regarded as a man’s possession, not even to be looked at by other males.”

This confuses a number of issues. Is there a right to be ‘dehumanised’? There is no such thing as a ‘right’ to be regarded as a man’s possession. One may tolerate it, but one never gives it the status of a claim that has to be respected.

In this context the ‘right’ not to wear the voile intégral (the unambiguous French term referring to the ‘total’ extension of veiling) is meaningless. I have just as much a right not to support the BNP and not wear a swastika T-shirt. But do I have the right to demand that this clothing be accepted and protected? Who then has the obligation to make sure this right is a reality? The law? Or what?

The assertion is confused: either it means that there should be a legally protected ability to wear certain types of religious clothing - however ‘dehumanised’ - and an instrument to enforce this claim against anyone opposing it, or this is one of those ‘rights’ that exist in very rarified ether?

It is in the same vein that the idea that the “state should not decide what people wear” is advanced. True, in general this is a good basic principle. But this is another abstract claim which soon runs into obstacles. What, to start with, if it is the state’s institutions that are involved? Who then decides on what the state does? And what should this be?

Peter Manson accepts that “certain jobs - the teaching of young children or the welcoming of guests at a hotel - cannot in general be carried out satisfactorily by people who completely cover their face.” I would say that any position in which a person has power over others should not be occupied by somebody loudly proclaiming that anyone who does not dress as they do is impure. In other words, public functions. If we have state - or wider public - institutions they need rules, and these should not tolerate anti-equality practices - like the burqa and niqab. Democracy rests on égalité.

Next, the French context is that the republic is not just secular in a negative sense, but positively aspires to the values of equality, fraternity and liberty. This implies that activities against this are, in a deep sense, anti-republican. The burqa is one such practice. Racism is equally anti-republican. The Islamists offer a quasi-religious racism (drawing boundaries between the pure believers and the impure non-believers) in a noxious anti-republican cocktail. It is hardly unlikely that the far more serious problem of marginalisation of the poor in the banlieues can be fought without equally offering a strategy against their exclusion. This Sarkozy does not do, to say the least.

The French left (from the Parti Communiste Français, Lutte Ouvrière and Parti de Gauche to the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) therefore tends to concentrate on wider issues of social inequality and oppression (which affects much larger communities than Muslims, as recent rioting by Rom indicates). This is not a result of their Jacobin DNA, but a perfectly justified reaction to present-day French conditions. The republican tradition brings people back to equality and not to the brief, anti-clerical Age of Reason.

Finally, says Peter Manson, socialists “strive to empower oppressed minorities, and oppressed women in particular. We do this to unite and strengthen the working class, to weaken the power of the state and the system of capital. And part of that fight involves breaking the grip of the mosque and the Muslim establishment over their flock.”

But he offers no account of how exactly how this can be done. Some on the British left, like the ill-fated Respect coalition, have actively collaborated with the ‘mosque’ - or rather far-right and rightwing fractions of Islamism. They have no authority to talk about Islamophobia - when they, and the Socialist Workers Party, have collaborated with such reactionary forces. These are quasi-state institutions in their own right - with close links with would-be (Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami) or actual state powers (Iran) in other lands. Many ‘moderate’ Muslims receive generous funding from the theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia.

Peter Manson does not outline any immediate political conclusions from his analysis. Does he support the campaigns of groups like Amnesty International to defend the ‘right’ to the burqa? Or Liberty’s most recent efforts? The decision of Liberty to threaten to take to court Tory MP Philip Hollobone, who says he would refuse to meet women wearing the burqa in his surgery, confirms this paradox. Is the Weekly Worker in favour then of using the law to enforce the right to wear the full-body veil? It is noteworthy that neither of these organisations even raises the issue of whether veiling may be oppressive.

Will Peter Manson back a campaign for secularism? In Britain religion has a privileged place in public authority (it is likely to grow with the ‘Big Society’). Multiculturalists have sought to extend this to all faiths, including Islam. The political influence of these institutions is growing, filling a vacuum in society left by the absence of mass working class movements and the fracturing of the left.

The defence of the burqa is part of a general trend to assert special, privileged protection for religious claims. It is root and branch against any form of equality. The assertion of religious rights, of which the ‘right’ to wear the burqa is just one, should be opposed, not embraced.

Despite a justified hostility to settling matters of religious faith by state decree, if we are engaged in politics we cannot avoid trying to influence what the state does. Fighting against Islamism, and political expressions of the moral codes that endorse the full-body veil, is only one aspect of this combat. But as a hard case it is an important test of secularist principle.

Religious rights
Religious rights