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Between 10,000 and 20,000 people attended the demonstration against pope Benedict’s state visit to the UK. The wide mix of people reflected an educated progressive group concerned that the politically religious groups are trying to roll back the gains that have been made in the UK. There was a carnival atmosphere with much British irreverence to authority. The highlights being the kinky nuns and priests and the kitchen workers standing on the balcony of the hotel they worked in turning their cook’s hats into pope hats and giving us all a wave. All of this contrasted sharply with the sycophantic grovelling of the majority of the press and our politicians who assure us that they “do do god now”.
You would have been disappointed if you were expecting a rerun of the Gordon riots or even the braying mobs that sometimes appear outside the trial of a paedophile. The crowd was not the sort looking to be whipped up by populist reactionaries - they were standing against the carnival of reaction. We would say that at least 90% of the people present could have given a coherent reason for being there, whether it was looking for the British state to take child protection seriously, gay rights, equality for women, scientific principles to be applied to medicine, the right for people to have authority over their own bodies, such as the right of abortion or assisted suicide, or taking a stand against making our school system even more divisive. We could not say that about most demonstrations we have been on, so we have to ask why the left does not really seem interested in addressing these people.
There was one other issue that got people’s goat: some unelected old guy with a murky past strolling in and telling us how to live our lives. One of my favourite placards showed a picture of the pope saying: “Your sex life is our business; our sex lives are none of your business”. We guess this is a difficulty that the left has engaging with people: that they are capable of asking hard questions and are not interested in being minions.
We did come across two members of the SWP. They were giving out the old “we’ve got to get rid of the Tories” line, after we’ve had at least 13 years of the Labour government not giving two hoots for us. Our comrades didn’t seem too happy to discuss their support for faith schools or the disingenuous nature of their contribution to the day. In fact, discussing politics was irrelevant to them - unlike giving out leaflets that no-one was interested in.
What seemed most ill-conceived about the day was the Weekly Worker’s criticism of the demonstration (‘No to crude anti-Catholicism’, September 16). Disappointingly, the Weekly Worker does not seem willing to address an important political concern expressed by politically advanced members of the working class.
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Disgusting
It seems there is no end to the use of fetishised photographs in the Weekly Worker.
In last week’s issue, there was a picture of Diane Abbott wearing neck jewellery. This was clearly meant to represent a black version of a pearl necklace.
Disgusting
Disgusting
Archetypal
In Peter Manson’s article (September 16) I am quoted from the internal CPGB list as dismissing the charge of being part of an “archetypal” left-communist opposition, against the confused approach of the PCC to the Labour leadership election. Our “archetypal” left-communism becomes the more vague charge of leftism in the Weekly Worker. The accusation of archetypal left-communism is easily dismissed with even the most basic knowledge of left-communism and its positions on parliament, the Labour party and the national question. Nowhere have those comrades opposed to the PCC line rejected temporary alliances with unprincipled forces, or stated that we are for an abstentionist approach to those we politically disagree with. Our approach is based on the maxim: firm in principle, flexible in tactics.
Comrade Manson also takes the quote from our internal list of me explaining that the Labour Party is not a “totally bourgeois party” to imply that we were arguing the very opposite of what I wrote on the internal list. The Labour Party remains a bourgeois-worker party.
The use of my refutation from the internal list of such nonsensical accusations was used in the Weekly Worker in a way that clouds the actual content of the political opposition by myself and other comrades, against a confused line pushed on the membership.
Archetypal
Archetypal
Which way?
Voting for Diane Abbott is, I think, the correct position to advocate (‘Debating the Labour leadership contest’, September 16). Given the choices available, she is clearly the left candidate in this contest. Of course, we disagree with Abbott and her place on the political spectrum is to the right of Marxism but, for an organisation of our size, we have to face the reality that a lot of people are to the right of us - several million!
There are going to be many in this contest who will vote for Abbott because they consider themselves the leftwing of the Labour Party. They consider themselves to be socialists and some of them may even be reading the Weekly Worker. To pooh-pooh their candidate with a call to abstain or spoil a ballot would be a mistake.
If we are to address the Labour Party, we need to be flexible and not dogmatic in our approach. The current leadership contest calls for some humility as we are in no position to hand out a party line to members of another party.
The Labour left have settled on Diane as their candidate. Those of us who are enfranchised by our union membership or who carry Labour Party cards, for whatever reason, should consider our votes as being the ones up for grabs by the Labour left. If they say to us that they think Diane deserves our votes, then we should vote for her, while, at the same time, making it clear that we are not convinced and, if it’s socialism they are after, Marxism is the ticket.
I suspect the majority of people on the left, but over to the right from where we lurk, will give Abbott either a first or second preference vote. In purely democratic terms, accepting the will of the majority is, in this situation, the right thing to do and ‘mostly harmless’.
The wider issue is the work we do in years going forward. Continuing to bang our heads against the sect leaders is, to my mind, futile. And it is our heads that will break rather than their sectarian walls, to paraphrase Gramsci.
We could plough our own field and build up our own sect - “increase our market share”, as Mike Macnair refers to it in his Communist University talk (http://vimeo.com/15021585). But what’s the point of that - to be the biggest sect? If the Socialist Workers Party’s position and the CPGB’s were reversed, Callinicos, Smith and company would rather be a small sect than a minority part of another sect or party, even with full factional rights.
This leaves us looking at the Labour Party. Is it entryism that is called for here? For what reason and on what terms? Surely, not to go in and pretend to be left Labourites, as the ‘Trotskyist’ Militant did in the post-war period, only to be expelled from its ranks, dazed and confused, with politics that are more like Tony Benn’s than Leon Trotsky’s.
Should we go in and attempt to attach ourselves to the existing groups in there? Perhaps the Labour Representation Committee - a faction of a faction within the Labour Party. I don’t know if that could realistically work.
What about brazenly revealing our communist politics in the branches? It has a bombastic appeal and would seem to chime with the Communist manifesto’s statement that “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
But how long would we last doing that? It may be an adventure that will leave us back on square one in short shrift, particularly if our presence is an embarrassment to the right wing. What we might achieve towards our overall goal of a communist party isn’t apparent from this vantage point.
Any move towards Labour as a field in which we frolic has to be well considered and sustainable over decades. Does that call for a semi-covert operation then? One in which we diligently establish credentials as Labour activists, openly acknowledge that we come from the far left, state that we are interested in Marx and such things, and seek out those around whom we might build discussion groups for current affairs and the reading of the classic works of political theory slipping in a bit of Marx, alongside Plato, Machiavelli and Rawls?
I’m largely clueless. Historical precedent doesn’t seem to help. Unlike in the 1930s when the Trotskyites found themselves out of the CPGB and looking for a field of activity, there is no Independent Labour Party with which to engage. I suppose there is the Communist Party of Britain. It could be argued that the fight over the British road to socialism and official communism was never fully won and getting in for another crack may produce results. Given their ongoing ideological demise, could it be the time for round two with official communism?
It’s crucial that we address the question of where we go next, and it should dwarf concerns over whether to back Abbott and nit-pick over this or that aspect of her politics, abstain or spoil the ballot.
Which way?
Which way?
It's a film
James Devine’s article on Avatar (‘The noble savage and colonialism’, September 9) exemplifies a rather stale way of dealing with art common on the left.
We learn an awful lot about the history of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype, and inevitably parallels are drawn with the overall narrative of Avatar, which is a fairly simple iteration of it on one level (savage as close to nature, as opposed to the rapacious ‘white’ colonists). This is perfectly true (indeed, mainstream film critics have rather cruelly dubbed it Dances with smurfs). Yet it stands in contradiction to Devine’s closing comment that we must analyse the film as a complete ideological package.
On this level, he fails. After all, in assigning basically zero importance to the much vaunted ‘anti-imperialist’ edge of the narrative (which is, of course, the other side of the noble savage coin, going back to Rousseau), he himself fails to examine the full ideological implications of it. Devine argues that the anti-war business is a kind of bait to get the audience to swallow the noble savage myth - but one could, with equal validity, simply reverse the poles and argue that the noble savage clichés are present only to sell an anti-war message assigned narrative hegemony in its place.
More importantly, it completely underplays any sense of the film as a film, considering it rather as a kind of box for the packing of ideology (talk about a container metaphor!). For Devine, everything outside the narrative is utterly unimportant - all cultural activity is reduced to a variation on direct political indoctrination. (One wonders what he makes of Gaugin or Picasso.) Avatar corresponds broadly to that school of cinema (and, for that matter, video games) which seeks to breathe life into extremely clichéd narratives through recourse to technical spectacle. Avatar’s key selling point to the mass of film-goers was not its patronising liberal critique of imperialism, but that it was a technical demonstration of the aesthetic power of the new wave of three-dimensional cinema.
As such, and in common with a depressingly great deal of contemporary blockbuster films, the narrative is just about the least important thing about the film. It is a mush of reheated clichés precisely because this offers up the least resistance to the spectacular goings-on on screen. We already know how the story is going to develop from the get-go; we can passively sit back and be bombarded by two and a half hours of green-screened derring-do.
The noble savage cliché’s importance is less about what it actually says than its status as, precisely, a cliché. The ideological sting is not so much a patronising representation of native peoples, but that whatever representation of native peoples - because of the determinate relationship between the formal structures of the film and the narrative - simply doesn’t matter. We go in, marvel at the effects, go home, and forget about it. The narrative process - in the end, about history-making - is denigrated as such.
Of course, it is possible to set blockbuster spectacle in a more productively problematic relationship with narrative - as shown by Christopher Nolan’s recent Inception, but also the ‘New Hollywood’ wave of films in the 60s and 70s. It is even possible, it seems, to make an awful lot of money doing so. Whether or not Hollywood bureaucrats will finance more films of this type is another matter - after all, nobody wants to make the next Heaven’s gate.
It's a film
It's a film
Predict a riot
So there you go. David Bates is criticised for being ignorant of working people’s concerns about race and nationality (Letters, September 16) after he writes an article that highlighted workers having these concerns (‘National chauvinism and xeno-racism’, September 2). He’s illustrated how he’s “in touch” with people’s real concerns but apparently he can’t be, really, because he’s not tailing other people by joining in the fight against people with differing national origins.
I imagine some readers may be fed up with these discussions and think we are blinkered to the up-and-coming catastrophic cuts and the (white, British) workers’ fightback. Perhaps I can point them to another paper: the Daily Mail, which has already predicted a spring and summer of discontent in 2010, let alone a winter of discontent coming up. They predicted 14 ‘discontent’ seasons out of the last 40 (over a third) and actually had 21 headlines predicting these. If your personal interest is in bravely and militantly predicting class struggle, then check out the Mail.
Predict a riot
Predict a riot
Networking
We would like to let your readers know about the launch of our new anti-capitalist social network - commrades.net - which is the first dedicated social network of its kind.
There are two kinds of promotion available; a group page or a site page. A site page contains a link to your website, a short description of the content, a screenshot of your homepage and a facility for our users to rate and comment. A group page contains the same basic features as a site page but with extra functions, such as an integrated discussion forum and the ability to add photos, videos and PDF documents.
If you feel that our network could be of any use to you, please drop us a line at www.commrades.net.
Networking
Networking
No ally of ours
Regarding Esen Uslu’s article (‘Much ado about nothing’, September 16), I should say that here in Turkey we do not take either the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) or its affiliates as a strategic ally in our struggle against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s fascist rule as both have roots in, and are manipulated by, the CIA.
The article is misleading for third party readers who may assume that the BDP is the leading socialist party in Turkey. In reality, the Kurdish movement acts as a Trojan horse in the communist and progressive community here in Turkey to hamper efforts paving the way to socialism.
The BDP is meant to rule out anti-imperialist struggle by Turkish communists against American plans in the Middle East, collaborates with Washington to create chauvinist conflicts and supports the gang of murderers in the Kurdistan Workers Party.
The BDP is trying to impose imperialist plans to separate Turkey and contribute to US plans to establish a puppet Kurdish nation in the Middle East whose policies could easily be influenced by the Pentagon. That’s probably why the BDP’s mischievous policies and long-term plans are highly welcomed and tolerated by the ruling AKP.
No ally of ours
No ally of ours