Letters
Real threat
After you’ve devoted so much space to a non-event (‘Leftist dogma and exaggerated threats’, August 26), I look forward to your coverage of the events in Bradford on August 28.
The trouble is that the Socialist Workers Party hasn’t invented the English Defence League. Even if you take away the exaggeration and hysteria, the EDL is real and provokes a reaction. The left is badly split on how to react and there is much confusing double-talk about what is going on, but to hint that it is all made up by the SWP for their own internal and distorted reasons does not clarify or help; it just adds to the double-talk.
Maciej Zurowski may think that the EDL’s protest is to “express a specific viewpoint” but, when they express their xenophobic and Islamophobic viewpoint by throwing stones and a smoke bomb at onlookers and protestors, as they did in Bradford, I don’t think open debate will show them how wrong they are. Their violent aggression is real and the test I’d put to you is: do you stand with the rather unorganised crowd of (mostly) Bradfordians, black and white, Muslim and whatever, who turned up and sought to confront the EDL racists when they escaped from their enclosure?
Real threat
Real threat
EDL driven out
Saturday’s English Defence League demonstration in Bradford was different from most of the previous ones, as this time it was not countered directly by Unite Against Fascism. Instead the EDL was driven out of town by leftwing and community activists from organisations that refused to be part of UAF and Hope Not Hate’s so-called ‘multicultural festival’.
Police harassment managed to stop the counter-demonstration going ahead, as planned by Leeds Anti-Fascism and Anti-Racism Network and Bradford United Against Racism, while UAF called for support for the ‘We are Bradford’ gathering. The police split up groups of people they suspected of being anti-fascist protestors. While leafleting in the city centre calling for a counter-demonstration, we were surrounded and forced to walk in twos - groups were not allowed. Some were threatened with arrest for standing with more than one comrade in the park next to Centenary Square. Albion Street, where the anarchist social club is located, was heavily surrounded. It was impossible to go in and out without being stopped and searched, filling out personal details and being photographed by a grumpy copper.
Disorganisation and disunity in the anti-fascist movement and among the left was evident. No-one had a clear idea of what was really going on. There were different events taking place at the same time in areas authorised by the police beforehand. So when a counter-demonstration seemed impossible, some left for the UAF event and some headed toward the official council gathering outside the city centre.
‘We are Bradford’ was absurd. It was located in an area far away from the eyes of the public - some even thought it was an EDL gathering because nothing apart from the police was visible from the main road. A dozen Asian youth who had come from Birmingham to defend the mosque near where the EDL was holding its “static assembly” were so frustrated: they refused to be part of it and soon left.
Some of the speeches were more appropriate to a guild hall celebration than an anti-fascist event. People were told to put their trust in those who did not let them walk freely with their companions - the police were clearly primed up to arrest anti-fascists at the drop of a hat.
After walking around the city in ones and twos, a number of community and anti-fascist activists - mostly unaffiliated to UAF - were finally able to gather metres from the EDL assembly. Despite smoke bombs, bottles and stones thrown from the EDL side amid chants of “We love the floods” (referring to the latest humanitarian crises in Pakistan), it was the anti-fascists the police attacked, forcing them into two separate streets and attempting to kettle them. There were confrontations, as people were determined to push back police lines to get closer to the EDL. The anti-fascist gathering grew in numbers, in opposition to the call of UAF and Hope Not Hate to stick with the ‘We are Bradford’ event. When a group of hundred or so managed to break out from the EDL’s main demonstration, UAF, Hope Not Hate and the mullahs called for people to stand by and watch, as the fascists went wild.
Without police permission and stewards, the unofficial counter-demonstration - made up of Asian youth, local residents and leftwing activists, including comrades from Workers Power, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and assorted anarchists - chased the EDL all the way, trapped them in Forster Square station and forced them out of Bradford.
It is vital to understand that if the counter-demonstration had not taken place, the state-friendly strategy of UAF and Hope Not Hate would have let the EDL free to rampage around the city and Bradford could have been labelled a success for the EDL. But what stopped them was the determination of the local youth and those unaffiliated to UAF, who stood face to face against the EDL in defence of the community.
EDL driven out
EDL driven out
New friends
This year I participated in the CPGB’s Communist University for the first time, attending from the opening until the end. The programme was very intense, but also very interesting. I have not mastered English very well and this made understanding difficult. Despite this problem, I could follow most of the presentations and discussions.
During those seven days, I made new friends. We exchanged experiences and reflected on joint activities. I am very happy to have been there and I hope to return next year.
New friends
New friends
Untwisted
In response to David Douglass’s comment, I do not have a “twisted mind” (Letters, August 26). I am sane and happy, thank you.
I am not at all surprised by your use of language in response to my letter. It’s very clear to me that no matter how much people try to engage with you about certain topics - in particular, violence against women - you just don’t get it.
A comment left on the Raoul Moat fan page on Facebook said: “If my mrs ever does to me what she did to Raoul I hope I’m brave enough to do a Moaty.”
As Sarah Churchill wrote in the New Statesman, “Thus a new expression enters the language: ‘doing a Moaty’, otherwise known as ‘bravely’ attempting to murder women who have the unmitigated gall to try to end a relationship with someone who is, in fact, homicidal. How dare we? All of these stories have a sickening common denominator: they are about men who think that it is permissible, even estimable, to attack women. And they are about the society that so concurs with this attitude that it doesn’t even notice.”
The world is full of people who disagree with you. Facing this fact is part of growing up.
Untwisted
Untwisted
Dehumanisation
I am enormously flattered, if surprised, to have gone from man-hating lesbian to “queen of the Taliban” in less than three months (Letters, August 26). This is better than Blair’s Bambi to Stalin. I genuinely had no idea it was this easy to annoy so many men in so little time.
There seems to be some confusion regarding my position. I do not support the British state’s inadequate intervention in areas of violence against women. It is clear from all available evidence that women and children are not protected from sexual or domestic violence by the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, we labour under the misapprehension that men are inevitably sexually predatory and violent as if this is a force of nature, like weather; an inconvenience we have to put up with. I fundamentally do not accept what is, in many cases, a convenient excuse.
Sorry, boys: I believe men’s behaviour, like women’s, to be socially constructed and therefore subject to change. It could be argued that men have a responsibility to assist in that process. Nor do I support the Taliban or any social or political organisation which creates or tolerates the economic, social or sexual control of women by religious authority, the state or male domination.
My letters to this paper have concerned examples of individuals, or organisations (the CPGB) which, I have argued, have shown an unhelpful toleration of situations which should be clearly stated as unacceptable to socialists. Dave Douglass’s point about the treatment of the National Union of Mineworkers by the police is accepted. It does not follow that those who supported Moat in that context should not be challenged on their acceptance of his domestic violence. This is not a private matter of his personal relationships; it is just as much subject to political consideration as his relationship with his employer or the police.
The same applies to the issue of the burqa ban in France. The distinction between public and private spheres, so much emphasised in bourgeois society, is hugely unhelpful to women. Religion, and its enforcement through the agency of the male-dominated family (both thought to properly belong in the private sphere), is therefore insulated from the influence of the republican ideals of the French state, leaving women in a particularly vulnerable position which a liberal/libertarian focus on personal choice does little to mitigate.
My use of the word ‘fetishised’ is not simply in the sense of furry handcuffs and PVC thongs, but in the sense of Marx’s phrase ‘commodity fetishism’, whereby relations between people appear to be relations between things. Therefore, disembodied made-up eyes through a niqab represent the social system whereby women’s sexuality for their own enjoyment is controlled, while simultaneously available for the entertainment of culturally approved men. This weird idea I have of men driven wild with lust is one shared by the woman (however misguided) who wrote the original article in The Sunday Telegraph, quoted by Peter Manson.
The use of these images by the Weekly Worker, like that of boots under the street lamp to signify ‘prostitution’, merely colludes in the dehumanisation of the women thus depicted, and therefore all women. I thought socialists were meant to be against that sort of thing.
Dehumanisation
Dehumanisation
Determinist
The main problem I have with Nick Rogers’ argument is that it is so determinist (‘Communist transition’, August 26). He mentions that the period of transition will be a period of class struggle - in fact Marx and Lenin say “intense” class struggle - and yet his whole description of the problems, say, of developing worker cooperatives remains at the level of the working out of blind economic forces, with not one mention of what the role of communists and the workers’ party would be within those cooperatives!
Even at the level of economics, his argument is faulty. He says: “If workers’ cooperatives become dominant, it is not clear that social development will tend towards greater socialisation. We will effectively have created a property interest that might well resist moves towards social ownership.” Well, what we do know from experience is that state ownership can create the conditions for such social ownership to result not in social control, but in bureaucratic control, and the subsequent undermining of that very social ownership. But, also, if we take Nick’s correct statement that cooperatives under capitalism contain that basic contradiction, then we also have the reason why his argument is wrong - because capitalism itself has an economic drive towards socialisation. That drive is not only manifest in the division of labour, but also by the fact that capital is forced by the operation of the market to centralise and to concentrate. Capital, in so far as it continues to function as capital in a cooperative, will be forced to operate by that same law.
In order to obtain the benefits of the economies of scale, to reduce competition that might reduce profits, every cooperative will have an incentive to merge its activities with other cooperatives, and indeed to take over existing private businesses. Indeed, to the extent that cooperative production demonstrates its advantages over private and state capitalist production - advantages arising precisely out of the fact of higher labour productivity and efficiency - so that lesson of the greater effectiveness of cooperative production will lead each co-op to recognise the benefits of extending that principle outside the limits of its own enterprise.
Nick says that some enterprises will make more money than others. That is undoubtedly true, but this is one reason that Marx argued that cooperatives had to be a part of a national federation, with all of the profits beyond a certain minimum level being centralised within it, so that they could be used to invest and to expand the co-op sector. I have argued previously that, in addition, this centralised body could also pay out dividends to workers, thereby smoothing out these differences in profitability. In addition, it could build up funds to cover sickness and pension benefits for workers, bringing these functions under its auspices and out of the hands of the capitalist state. In fact, the co-op itself undertook that function in Britain in the 19th century. There would be considerable benefit of such a function being brought under the expertise of a cooperative bank, as a precursor to workers demanding that all of their pension funds - including those held by the state - were transferred to its management.
I have also argued that this same economic drive applies across national boundaries, and cooperatives have always had internationalism as a guiding feature - and have been able to implement it far more effectively than either the workers’ parties or the trade unions. In this respect, the centralisation of profits, and the provision from them of pensions and other benefits would be a massive incentive for workers in less developed economies, where such benefits may not be available at all, to create their own cooperatives affiliated to such a federation.
But, even if workers decided not to join such a federation, decided not to pay their profits into such a central fund in return for the benefits outlined - as well as the others I have outlined elsewhere - Nick’s objection is not decisive. As he quotes, Marx himself said in the Critique of the Gotha programme, even during the first phase of socialism, when bourgeois right continues, such inequality is bound to be present. If all workers draw out of a central store goods whose value in labour-time is equal to the labour-time contributed by the individual worker, then inequality must arise because not all workers are equal. Some are stronger, some more skilful and so on. But this inequality is qualitatively different from that which exists under capitalism, and which arises out of the non-ownership of the means of production. As he says in the Critique, establish cooperative production and you automatically change the basis of distribution between labour and capital. It is that division, that fundamental inequality, that we seek to undermine and which the establishment of cooperatives achieves.
Nick also says that a co-op would only take on additional workers if per capita added value increases, which is an additional hurdle compared to a private capitalist. But, for one thing, this ignores the higher labour productivity of a workers’ co-op. Additionally, the fact that it does not simply expand the workforce willy-nilly can be a benefit. The private capitalist will expand the workforce in good times, in the knowledge that in slack times they can simply sack workers. Nick has taken on board all of the arguments of bourgeois economics in trying to understand how such a firm would operate. The fact is that a workers’ cooperative may well decide to forego short-run profit maximisation precisely in order to build up funds to cover those periods when trade is depressed, so as to avoid laying off its members, and it may use such periods for retraining, giving it a longer-term, profit-maximising advantage over private capital.
I would argue that the basic dynamic of co-ops is such that they are extremely conducive to the intervention of Marxists within them, in order to win workers to the idea of a society which is a macrocosm of the co-op itself. Ironically, that is something which most certainly cannot be said of a trade union, whose function is the maintenance of capitalist society and the reproduction of bargaining within it. Yet ‘Marxists’ have tended to overemphasise activity in the latter and to disdain activity in the former.
Determinist
Determinist