Letters

Misengineered

Peter Manson has put forward a consistent libertarian position in his two articles arguing that individual woman should decide what they wear rather than ‘leftists’ deciding for them (‘Freedom to choose emancipation and dress’, August 5).

With regard to Bill Cookson’s decree that some clothing “has nothing whatever to do with Islam”, Peter replies: “It is pointless trying to ‘prove’ that they are not following the Qu’ran’s stipulations correctly. What does it matter either way?” I would say it matters in so far as it illustrates that Bill Cookson is arguing against secularism. He is trying to side with some Islamic faiths against others whom he believes to be heretics.

The opposition to Peter’s articles tend to display little concern about the state telling people what they can and can’t wear. History suggests such authoritarianism doesn’t work and the Soviet Union didn’t succeed in suppressing attitudes it would rather not have existed. It is likely that the growth of current Islamism was forged in their reaction to the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan. They failed to ‘roll back the mullahs’ and ‘lift the veil’ when some ‘communists’ imagined they were attempting to knock the religion out of them for their own good.

Forcing women who choose to wear a veil to house imprisonment may not be the consequence that the social engineers wish for.

Misengineered
Misengineered

Tokenistic

It truly is beyond parody. In your article on the burqa, we are asked to accept the opinion of a random individual with some personal experience of a given situation, as reported in The Sunday Telegraph. That’s right - The Sunday Telegraph is our political guide.

It’s all right, though, because it’s not an important, serious political issue; just the trivial matter of controlling women’s freedom via the medium of clothes or, in this case, the burqa. Naturally enough, the particular woman in question finds great personal fulfilment in being pursued by numbers of men while ‘empowered’ by the anonymity provided by her burqa - an “advantage” that the unfortunate men must do without. Somehow they managed to survive the ordeal.

Apparently, we would all benefit from being liberated from the pressure to conform to western stereotypes of beauty. Really? You don’t say. Why has nobody ever mentioned this before? Since there is no possibility of changing the political circumstances creating this oppressive situation, we should welcome the freedom of the burqa. To make sure we understand the sexual allure of a woman thus clad, we are provided (again) with a handy illustration of the inviting mystery of those eyes, full of eastern promise. Carry on up the Casbah, comrades. I won’t get into a discussion of your casual use of the term ‘patriarchy’ (undefined).

We are repeatedly reminded that we need not worry that women might become sexually unavailable as a result of all this burqa wearing. Heaven forefend. No, there are still bits of depersonalised female flesh to gratify any lechery requirements - eyes, of course, and feet. Our attention is drawn to the importance of a good pedicure and the vital role of eye make-up in expressing our sexuality.

For pity’s sake, stop this patronising nonsense. Your initial decision to kick off a discussion, which some of us persist in believing to be of significant political importance, in this way demonstrates an underlying tokenism which inevitably leads to some wholly reactionary statements concerning a supposed contradiction between the intended effect of the burqa and its actual result on men’s behaviour and women’s consequent natural delight.

This week’s Solidarity has an article on the French burqa ban by Yves Coleman of Ni Patrie Ni Frontières, who appears to have some basic idea of the general political context. I offer no opinion as to the quality of the article, except to point out that it constitutes a genuine attempt at political understanding, which your own article, sadly, does not.

Many readers have found your organisation to take a tokenistic attitude toward issues of women’s oppression, which is a direct result of inadequate theoretical analysis, made more evident in comparison with your rigorous approach to other areas.

Tokenistic
Tokenistic

Strange blokes

It takes a particularly twisted mind to convert my clear and unequivocal statement that “The attack on the former partner [of Raoul Moat] was cruel and unwarranted” into a suggestion that such an attack on some other occasion may be warranted (Letters, August 5). Nothing I said has ever suggested such a disgusting implication.

As for Heather Downs’ ‘clarification’ that Raoul was “sent down for battering his child”, I confess that this is news to me. All of the press and media reports I’ve read and heard said that he was sent down for 18 weeks for a fight with a teenager in a domestic argument. Nothing I’ve read previously has suggested that this was “his child”. My point remains that his main grudge was against the police, not women. It was they and the other state enforcement agencies that he blamed for pushing him over the edge. It was his hatred for the police and their role on the streets and communities of the north which caused the demonstrations of ‘support’ for him, not his vicious attack on his former partner or previous violence.

As for Heather’s condemnation of the choice of picture of a woman in a niqab, “eyes with make-up and nails with varnish” being “yet another fetishised image of disembodied female parts”, if she seriously thinks this is an image that is going to have men salivating in sexual anticipation, then she knows some very strange blokes.

Strange blokes
Strange blokes

Muslim privilege

In reply to Phil Kent (Letters, August 5), I never referred to “White rights” in my letter (July 29). This was a title the editor chose to give it.

I was actually talking about the non-Islamic population of Britain, regardless of race, colour or religion, being forced to withhold their own religious/secular, cultural and social activities in order not to offend Muslims - various celebrations of Christmas or Easter, for example, food on the menu at schools, dress at swimming baths, etc. I was talking about the ‘right’ to cover your face being defended for Muslims, but no-one else. The right to wear an offensive and provocative item of clothing for Muslims, but no-one else. The right for them to be offended by what the rest of us do, but not the other way round.

All of this is true, but the left, Weekly Worker included, are happy to practise the double standards of the bourgeois liberal state and its institutions. You’re simply not telling the truth or presenting a fair picture. This is what (in part) has pissed off millions of workers, and what alienates you and the left from them.

You won’t take our concerns seriously or debate them without the charge of ‘fascist’ or ‘racialist’, even though these terms are nowhere near relevant to those concerns. You don’t understand: we don’t care what they do, what they wear, what they think - that’s up to them. They can believe and do anything they want. But we don’t want their values imposed on us.

We don’t want our kids - kids of any religion or background - forced to be taught by a teacher in a Halloween outfit like the niqab. We don’t want the bus driver or the bank teller covered up and mumbling behind the veil. We want to be able to eat turkey at Christmas in school or at work. We want our opinions and values taken account of as much as theirs. We want the right to say that in public without charges of racial hatred or accusations of being a fascist.

As for Heather Downs, queen of the Taliban, complaining that the front-page picture of a woman in a full niqab, covered from head to toe in black with only her eyes showing, was a sexual picture aimed at the gratification of men, what planet do you live on?

Muslim privilege
Muslim privilege

Trivialisation

Across the modern world there is a general acceptance that certain specific items of clothing should be worn. We don’t go entirely naked in public and there are various reasons, in different national cultures, as to what is regarded as socially acceptable.

Of course, the burqa should not be banned, but that is no reason for Phil Kent to trivialise the cultural complexity of clothing by slipping the question of the burqa between the growing and shaping of hair and the wearing of wigs. The burqa does not simply tell us that the wearer is a woman who believes her religion requires her to do so; it also indicates that the woman does not permit herself to visually communicate with others.

The practice of her belief should not give her the right to command others to communicate with her, particularly as we are generally able to communicate either orally or through writing in conditions of equality.

Trivialisation
Trivialisation

Luxurious Gaza

Tony Greenstein writes in his usual polemical fashion agreeing with David Cameron (‘Official: Gaza is a prison camp’, August 5). Cameron and Greenstein both attempt to appease pro-Islamic opinion in Turkey and Gaza/Iran/Lebanon, to the effect that Hamas and the Palestinians are victims of the Israelis who are demonised accordingly. The ‘facts’, then, are garnered to fit the foregone conclusion.

Such cheap polemical journalism has no place in the Weekly Worker if it intends to educate a new generation of comrades to think intelligently and critically. Comrades should check out the photographs of the new shopping malls, street markets and shops full of produce, restaurants, Olympic-size swimming pool, and Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, going to her luxury hotel, shopping and receiving her honorary Hamas passport, so that she can continue, also, to report that Gaza is a “prison camp”. But the facts speak otherwise when they are allowed to escape from the distorted lens of Greenstein and his ilk (see www.Tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives).

One last point comrades should remember: Hamas is at war with Israel and thus Israel will attempt to stop weapons from Iran and others getting into Gaza until a sustainable peace is achieved via a two-state solution. Greenstein can polemicise and miseducate to his heart’s content, but it is a pity that the Weekly Worker publishes such polemic; at least it could commission a corrective.

Luxurious Gaza
Luxurious Gaza

Labour lessons

With due respect to Mark Fischer, there is not much for communists in Britain to learn from the Russian Revolution of 1917, and this applies to all other industrially advanced capitalist countries as well (‘Learning Russian’, July 29).

Since the Russian Revolution occurred in a backward, largely peasant society, it is not clear to me why Fischer considers that there are many lessons for early 21st century Britain either with regard to the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, or in respect of the development of the revolution itself. Those who maintain otherwise are mistaking nostalgia with Marxism and the latter with dogma

The British left can only be led to a higher, non-sectarian level, not by ‘learning Russian’, but by learning democracy. Of course, my view that there is not much to learn from the Russian Revolution for the contemporary left is not the same as saying there is nothing to learn. Indeed, the most important lesson is precisely the one which most of the British left has turned its back on, and this is how we relate to the capitalist-roaders in the Labour Party. Instead of calling on the pro-capitalist elements within Labour to break with capitalism, as Lenin did during 1917 in relation to the Mensheviks, the tiny sects are calling on the working class to break from the Labour Party in a period which is bound to see an increasing radicalisation of the Labour ranks, as the present energy-related economic crisis deepens.

Labour lessons
Labour lessons

Vote rightwing

John Smithee states that he has rejoined the Labour Party (Letters, July 1). Why? The Labour Party is no longer a mass party of working people, but a dead, hollowed-out shell - dominated by those seeking to advance their career rather than the cause.

Barely 29%, of the 64% who voted, voted Labour - the second lowest since 1945. Some estimates suggest five million people cannot be bothered to register to vote, often because they see little difference between the established main parties. The Labour Party has one of the lowest levels of membership of any social democratic party, despite lowering its membership fees to a minimum.

When I was active in the party in the 1970s and 80s, 30-40 people would attend branch meetings in my home town of Leamington Spa. It had a youth section of 20-30 members. There was real competition for holding office in the ward and winning a seat on the general management committee. Political debate, education and discussion crackled through the party from the bottom up, as the left surged forward to deselect rightwing councillors and parliamentary representatives and elect socialists who would defend conference policies. Eighty to 100 attended monthly management committees. Nothing like this exists in the current Labour Party. Many local parties, even in large cities, struggle to have more than a few dozen activists.

I will be voting in the Labour leadership election - not through having joined this corpse of a party, but through my trade union membership of Unite. I will be voting for the most rightwing candidate likely to keep the Labour Party on its rightwing managerialist track.

Now is not the time to even consider rejoining Labour, but the reverse. The conditions in the coming period present some of the best circumstances for forming a new party of labour. The prospect of the alternative vote electoral system offers a real opportunity for a united party of the left to gain credible first-preference votes.

Labour Party leaders both nationally and locally will be forced to choose. Do they defend and protect their local communities or do they abuse working people and service-users and slash jobs and services? Anti-cuts campaigners and workers taking action to defend jobs, services and pensions will rapidly see that Labour is found wanting.

Splitting the most militant trade union members from the Labour Party and drawing those involved in struggle into a broad, inclusive, united party of the left should be our objective. We need to learn the lessons of the stalled attempts so far to form various left parties, alliances and coalitions. An open, inclusive, federal structure is likely to be the way forward - not dissimilar from the founding origins of the Labour Party at the turn of the 19th century.

Vote rightwing
Vote rightwing

Sectarianism

There is a tradition of sectarianism towards the labour movement and mass organisations of the British working class within the British communist left. Traditions are powerful things. Henry Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation was regularly criticised for its abstract propaganda by Engels. The Independent Labour Party and British Socialist Party were also guilty and took their sectarianism into the early CPGB.

It was something that Lenin and Trotsky were well aware of, the former writing about it in Leftwing communism: an infantile disorder and his ‘Letter to Sylvia Pankhurst’. Trotsky also discussed it in Where is Britain going? and the Communist International was well aware of it.

There is an interesting story in Brian Pearce’s essays of how the CI dealt with the early CPGB’s sectarianism. Its representative, Borodin, came to Britain in 1921 and completely bypassed the newly formed CPGB because of its sectarianism towards the mass organisation. He went straight to south Wales to ask the miners there about how they had organised the pre-1921 rank-and-file committees and what their major demands were. He then took that information to the annual general meeting of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, where he argued vigorously for communists to be the best fighters for the 10% wage demand of the miners, relating seriously to the existing level of class-consciousness in order to raise it.

In the face of current massive attacks on the working class in Britain, the history of the early CPGB is, as they say, ‘rich in lessons’.

Sectarianism
Sectarianism