Letters
Slander
Chris Strafford maintains some gaping factual inaccuracies in his report from Manchester University (‘Marxism as a guide to action’, September 30). Communist Students and the CPGB don’t characteristically present themselves as a group of people with a solid grounding in reality, but CS’s activity on campus as of late seems to confirm that they have entered the stratosphere of the real.
Firstly, for Chris to argue that last year’s anti-cuts group was “decent [and] committed to free education, working with the unions and run on a democratic basis” is a fallacy. Last year’s group attracted only ‘actually existing socialists’, pulled in nobody from any other campaigns and failed to build a single event or demonstration. To accuse the union executive of thwarting the organisation is similarly unfounded. In fact, by publicising the first meeting of term, almost 40 students turned up, representing societies as broad as the union’s record company, the classics society, the Labour left and others. Furthermore, it was Communist Students who insisted upon raising the question of “consensus” decision-making, against the will of the majority of those present who wished neither to use it nor to consider doing so.
Chris reserves his worst slander for SWP members. He accuses us of opposing worker-student unity, shutting down debate and depoliticising the upcoming NUS demonstration. In fact, SWP members have been working closely with the Union executive to ensure the NUS demonstration is properly built with stalls, posters and open meetings - something CS has shown no interest in doing. SWP members helped draft a motion which is being put to a general meeting of students this month - openly in favour of worker-student unity and mandating our SU to support strikes and occupations at our university.
Finally, the only debate we have opposed is CS members’ repeated insistence that we deliberate such abstractions as the “use of ‘consensus’ decision making” and the online formation of agendas as opposed to drawing them up at the beginning of meetings.
Publishing an SWP member’s name in the Weekly Worker, without asking his permission, seemed both reckless and unsettling. However, the final straw for me was to see CS plastering posters of Joseph Stalin around the university on Monday morning (covering up several Action Palestine posters in the process), calling for an “open discussion” on whether Stalin was an anti-communist or not. The downright offensive notion that it is acceptable to uncritically plaster a mass murderer’s face around the university proves to me that, while Communist Students have their eyes on the stars, they’ve forgotten that they are lying deep in the gutter.
Slander
Slander
Reds
As a socialist, I was very pleased to see Ed Miliband elected as leader at the recent Labour Party conference held in Manchester.
The election of ‘Red Ed’ was a defeat for the supporters of New Labour, such as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, who wanted Ed’s brother David to be elected leader. This, together with the election of ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone as Labour’s candidate for London mayor, signifies a small but important shift to the left within the party. It opens up a space that socialists can use to win back the five million voters who have deserted Labour during the Blair years.
Winning back these mainly working class voters has been made a lot easier by the decision of the Labour conference to support the building of council houses. I will therefore look forward to seeing Fenland Labour Party include a major council house building programme in its manifesto for the May 2011 town and district council elections. Such a policy will be much welcomed by the 2,450 families, couples and individuals who are currently on the waiting lists for social housing in Fenland.
This, together with the election of Ed Miliband as Labour leader, will re-build Labour in the Fens.
Reds
Reds
Out of step
David Cameron’s refusal to support same-sex civil marriage looks increasingly isolated and out of step. He is ignoring the growing calls for marriage equality from senior figures within the Conservative party and from his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, the Labour opposition and the wider public.
He is the only major party leader who is taking a stand against marriage equality. Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband back marriage for gay couples. London mayor Boris Johnson is in favour, as is Margot James MP, until recently the Tory party vice-chair.
Cameron’s opposition to lifting the ban on gay marriage calls into question the sincerity of his professed pro-gay credentials. Nearly two-thirds of the public reject his support for the status quo, which bans gay couples from getting married in a registry office. A Populus poll in June 2009 found that 61% of the public believe that: “Gay couples should have an equal right to get married, not just to have civil partnerships.” Only 33% disagreed.
The tide is turning in the UK in favour of same-sex marriage. It is also a growing trend all over the world, from Canada to South Africa, Portugal and Argentina. Why can’t we have marriage equality in Britain too?
Some people say that civil partnerships are sufficient for gay couples. This is hypocritical. They would not accept a similar ban on black people getting married. They would never agree with a law that required black couples to register their relationships through a separate system called civil partnerships. It would be racist to have separate laws for black and white couples. We’d call it apartheid, like what used to exist in South Africa. Well, black people are not banned from marriage but lesbian and gay couples are. We are fobbed off with second class civil partnerships.
Civil marriage in a registry office should be open to everyone without discrimination. In a democracy, we are all supposed to be equal under the law. The Con-Lib coalition’s professed commitment to gay equality cannot be taken seriously while it upholds the ban on same-sex marriage.
Out of step
Out of step
Not my typo
Thanks a lot for running my piece, ‘Tea Party: rumblings on the frenzied right’ (September 30). Just one very minor quibble: Sarah Palin’s twitter didn’t call upon Republicans to “repudiate” claims that Abdel Feisal was a man of peace, as my draft was corrected to read. She called upon them to “refudiate” such claims, coining a much-ridiculed neologism, which she defended as a creative use of English.
Some things American politicians say are so ridiculous that an outsider can understandably mistake them for typos.
Not my typo
Not my typo
Warning
Jim Creegan writes of Paladino: “The ‘ruling class’ of his victory speech was not the one familiar to Marxists; he was referring instead to the politicians in the state capital at Albany, to whom he has threatened, figuratively, ‘to take a baseball bat’.”
But, surely, these politicians are the representatives of that ruling class familiar to Marxists! If not, who do these politicians, be they Republican or Democrat, represent - the workers? I don’t think so. Which then begs the question about the validity of Jim’s further statement that “Paladino’s anger, like that of all Tea Partiers, is directed at politicians, not the capitalists they now serve more openly than at any time since the gilded age that followed the civil war.”
In actual fact, all the evidence is that the majority of that capitalist class, certainly its upper reaches, in so far as it is represented in the Republican party rather than the Democrats (which tends to represent big capital and its more liberal wing), has been trying to do all in its power to stop the Tea Partiers getting elected over the more mainstream candidates. The Tea Partiers do represent a kind of revolution against capital - a revolution by plebeian elements. It is a rightwing populist movement that brings together the libertarian right, which draws a lot of its support from those involved in the financial markets as traders, from small capital, from sections of the middle class and from backward sections of the working class. It is a more virulent form of rightwing populism than that seen in Britain, with the current Tories, and in parts of Europe.
But the reality is that the kind of policies they are putting forward - big cuts in spending at a time of economic uncertainty and, in the case of the Tea Partiers and others, reactionary social policies - are not the kind of policies that big capital wants. Big capital established the big state because it needs long-term stability both economically and socially. The policies that the populists are promoting threaten both unnecessarily. It is small capital and the middle class that seek spending cuts because they do not correlate their immediate interests to the macro economy in the way that big capital does. On the contrary, they are more concerned with keeping their taxes low and interest rates low. Big capital can avoid tax and its access to the capital markets means it has cheaper alternatives than reliance on bank capital.
It is these backward sections which tend also to have illiberal attitudes in relation to racism, sexism and so on, and which utilise such divisions to divide workers in order to increase exploitation.
The rise of the Tea Party is a worrying sign because, in some ways, it is similar to the rise of similar movements at the beginning the last century, which eventually became the basis of the fascist parties. But it is necessary to understand the role of time. Those organisations never won the support of anything other than the odd maverick within the ranks of big capital at that time. Big capital only gave its support to fascism when its back was against the wall and, with hindsight, probably had misgivings about having done so. But this is more like the period immediately after the turn of the last century, not the period just before or after World War I.
The other reason that these populist movements gain support should also be a warning to the left, and that is that the left itself has failed to provide a credible solution around which these elements of society could be won, as a credible alternative to monopoly capitalism.
Warning
Warning
Move forward
I need to clarify the Socialist Alliance’s position on the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, and my own, in light of Phil Kent’s report of the CNWP open steering committee meeting (‘CNWP: dead men’s shoes’, September 30).
The SA did not argue that the CNWP ‘was going nowhere’. We are concerned about the pace of the progress towards the campaign for a new workers’ party becoming that actual party, as we have expressed on a number of occasions, but we are pleased that it is now a membership organisation which has agreed to discuss the potential structure of a new left party over the next 12 months. The CNWP is the most likely vehicle on the left to move the party-building process forward, and it is beginning to do so.
Similarly, in my speech moving the resolution, I did not “frustratedly complain that people were not joining the CNWP because they didn’t know what they were joining or which direction it was going in” or say that “People were more likely to join if the CNWP made a clear commitment to a party project”.
What I did say was that trade unions and community groups are more likely to take a new left party seriously than a campaign or coalition for one - something I have been saying for some time. My concern is partly motivated by the increasing likelihood of a move back into the Labour Party, and all that that means in terms of reformism, if the left does not get its act together fairly quickly. In terms of the CNWP, it does in fact have a clear direction - to build a new workers’ party.
Over 4,000 individuals have signed up to that, and Socialist Party members made it clear at the open steering committee meeting that they remain committed to campaigning for such a party, albeit at a slower pace than the majority in the SA would want.
One final minor correction: the CNWP is now committed to including a specific session at its 2011 conference to consider an outline draft constitution for a new left party which would then be put to a future founding conference. It is not the SA resolution that will be debated again at the CNWP conference next year. In the interim, we will discuss that constitution.
As Phil correctly points out in his article, the SA motion, and one from the Socialist Party, were both passed unanimously.
Not only does this suggest that the SP, like the SA, wants to move the project forward, but also that, despite a somewhat negative position against the CNWP being put forward by Phil on behalf of the CPGB, he and the CPGB must have voted in favour!
Move forward
Move forward
Question
Thanks for your article ‘Election lows and UN forces’ (September 23). I learned a lot from it. However, I have the following questions:
1) Don’t you think that the US does not want to eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, so that it has a convincing excuse to perpetuate its presence in the region?
Otherwise how is it possible that the creator (US) cannot annihilate the created (Taliban)?
2) What is behind the anti-US rhetoric of Karzai? Does he scramble to portray himself as an independent president and not a puppet? Is he trying to win the Taliban despite the US wish?
Question
Question
Storm
On Sunday October 3 around 7,000 people marched through Birmingham against the onslaught of cuts lined up for us by the Conservatives and Lib Dems. The demonstration attracted trade unionists, socialists and students from across the country. I marched for a while with the GMB contingent who seemed upbeat and clearly energised. The weather was atrocious, yet the mood was militant. There was a common feeling that we could defeat the cuts agenda if we mobilise properly.
The speeches were in similar vein to what we have heard over the last few months. Labour left MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell urged the movement to defend the welfare state. McDonnell stressed that if the Tories come for us, we will come for them, with strikes, occupations, civil disobedience and direct action. Jane Loftus, president of the CWU, said that her union would build solidarity with those in struggle, whilst Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, said politicians of all parties, including Labour, told us that cuts were inevitable. It’s lies. The PCS is proud to say that there shouldn’t be a single job lost, or a single penny out of public spending. The rhetoric that is on offer from the trade union leadership has to be transformed into action against the austerity programme.
The SWP’s leadership decision to demand a general strike from the TUC was echoed throughout the demonstration, with placards, chants and a call to arms from Chris Bambery. He said, we need to go from here and start saying that if in Greece, if in France, if in Spain they can have a general strike, then we can have a general strike here in Britain. It is a common line of argument we have heard from the SWP time and time again.
Martin Smith and other SWP leaders appear unaware of the historic defeats that the working class in Britain has suffered over the last few decades. Working class solidarity and organisation is at an historic low; we have to carry out a struggle to rebuild working class organisation before we can consider calling a general strike.
Martin Smith argued in the SWP’s Party Notes (September 21) that it would not be seen as ultra-left posturing. But that is exactly what it is. The arguments of the SWP leaders are reminiscent of the mistaken approach adopted by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the run up to the 1926 general strike. It was clear to them that the working class would have to fight and they had passed motions and written articles warning the class that the TUC would betray the struggle. However, they mistakenly mobilised their forces into backing the TUC’s lacklustre campaign, which inevitably buckled at the key moment. The TUC was not up to the task of leading a successful general strike in 1926, and it is not up to the job today.
The demonstration was barely within view of the conference, which the police had barricaded with steel walls, blocked roads and thousands of police officers. They led us around back streets and forced us to hold our rally in a muddy pothole-ridden car park. The Tory’s police protection could only have been overcome through mass action involving many more thousands than were in Birmingham on Sunday. The anarchists, however, decided to create a spectacle, a courageous defeat, when they marched at the police lines - before being kettled, searched and put on file. The stunt was futile and the claims of disrupting the conference were shown to be hollow.
The SWP issued a statement in favour of a united anti-cuts campaign. It called on the Coalition of Resistance and the National Shop Stewards Network to get together and work with their Right to Work (RTW) campaign. The RTW conference has been offered as a space to bring these campaigns together; we must demand that this conference is open to motions and will elect a steering committee where all sections of our movement are represented. If it does not, it will be obvious to all that the call was just a cynical ploy to outmanoeuvre the campaigns.
The demonstration and these anti-cuts campaigns are useful to a point: they can certainly bring together rank-and-file trade unionists, but only on trade-union politics. If we are to defeat these cuts and bring down this government, then we need a message that goes beyond what is acceptable to the left union leaders. We must imbue these struggles with socialist politics and fight not just for a programme of social democracy, but communism.
Storm
Storm
Marbles
As expected, the pugnacious Robert Clough has replied to my article on developments in Cuba. It is a pretty scattergun account of the usual tropes of his organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Group.
It is to be expected, therefore, that he rises to the defence of the Cuban regime. I am roundly criticised for drawing on ‘bourgeois’ sources, such as his unlikely bete noire, Rory Carroll of the Guardian.
This is distinctly peculiar in itself, given his own citations of Lenin’s theories concerning imperialism as the basis for opportunism - after all, a major source for Lenin’s work is the thoroughly bourgeois Hobson. In fact, Marxists back to Marx have made critical use of bourgeois sources in their work (plenty of ‘reactionary bourgeois journalists’ turn up in the pages of Capital) - not shunned them for fear of the touch of pitch. It used to be called intellectual seriousness - now it is evidence of contamination. (As an aside, I do not refuse to use Cuban sources - indeed, I attempted, to no avail, to find news of Raul’s reforms in the English edition of Granma.)
Once the wild fulminations against ‘Trotskyism’ (now, for once, I know how Bob Crow feels) are concluded, we do get some kind of commentary on these reforms. I must here retract a claim in my original article, which suggested that the RCG and the like may find it difficult to swallow the regime’s twists and turns in the manner of the ‘official communist’ press.
There is no such vacillation on the part of comrade Clough - there are difficulties in building socialism, they must “raise the cultural level of the people” and so forth. Fair enough. But that implicitly characterises this spate of reforms as a tactical retreat - and one has to ask the question, to what are the Cuban ‘communists’ retreating? The only logical answer is capitalism. Nothing Clough writes on Cuba could not appear in the Morning Star with the word ‘China’ substituted for Cuba - one wonders whether his defence of China is quite so vigorous.
Moving on to the Labour Party, the comrade really loses his bearings - and his marbles. A roll-call of British ‘Trotskyists’ is accused of softness on Labour - including the Socialist Party, who have shared his opinion of it for two decades now. Perhaps he should consider this progress. That he relies so heavily on Lenin becomes deeply ironic in combination with his ultra-abstentionist line on Labour, whose antecedents were the subject of ‘Left-wing’ communism, an infantile disorder. Then, as now, Labour had bloodstained hands - and the communists were weak.
He may object, perhaps, that then the Labour Party had a real base in the working class, whereas now it is dominated by middle class types. However, his yardstick for this is that large numbers of its membership have “degrees or equivalent”, which, in the topsy-turvy world of the RCG’s (as it happens, basically bourgeois) class analysis, apparently excludes you in advance from the wage relation.
This, of course, conveniently ignores the fact that, a week or two ago, the vast majority of trade union members in the country had a say in who the Labour leader was (perhaps enough of them have those perfidious degrees for the whole lot not to count for Clough); it also ignores the fact that the majority of class-conscious workers remain, despite the best efforts of all of us, Labour voters. You can forget Labour’s hold on the working class, comrade, but it will not forget you.
In fact, almost every accusation Clough makes is untrue of myself and the CPGB (and even of the sundry Trots with whom we are lumped in, except maybe that ne plus ultra of Trotskyist degeneracy, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), but can quite easily be fired back at him. He says we turn a blind eye to Labour’s crimes (what paper are you reading, exactly?) but pore over the Cuban leadership with a microscope; but the truth is that he is so blinded by disgust at Labour’s perfidy he cannot even support it “as the rope supports the hanged man”, yet obediently recites whatever line the Castros feed him. We “ignore” Lenin on the basis for opportunism in the workers’ movement (actually, I disagree with Lenin, but that’s another matter); he ignores Lenin’s recommendations on Labour. The Cubans can take difficult decisions to deal with the problems of ‘socialism’ - but communists in the west are expressly forbidden from dirtying themselves by interacting with social democracy.
Finally, he accuses us of petty bourgeois lightness of mind, when in his persistent and overwhelming moralism he is nothing more nor less than the ultra-left shadow of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
If the Cubans wait for the “Trotskyists” to make revolution in Europe, he says, they will wait forever. His ominous prediction will certainly be fulfilled if we adopt his political approach.
Marbles
Marbles
Cuba
Comrade Robert Clough of the RCG is right to criticise the sectarian attitude of many on the left towards Cuba. (Letters, September 30)
In my view, Cuba is a standing refutation of the Trotskyist thesis about the impossibility of building socialism in one country, so in order to uphold this position in the face of contrary evidence, many Trotskyists are forced to deny the socialist nature of Cuba. Whether Cuba will remain socialist is another question. All I can say is that leaving the socialist path would be a disaster for the Cuban people in view of the coming global energy decline.
Cuba is very important for the left because it prefigures the energy future of the world for the generation now living. Cuba was able to survive its energy crisis when the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off its oil supply. The oil shortage which Cuban society experienced will eventually be repeated in other countries. Having correctly, in my view, opposed Trotskyist sectarianism in relation to Cuba, Comrade Clough launches into his own brand of RCG sectarianism. He claims that communists seek to destroy the Labour Party, “… just as Lenin wanted to destroy the Mensheviks”. But did Lenin seek the destruction of the Labour Party, and did he destroy the Mensheviks? Rather than calling on communists to destroy the Labour Party, which turns him into an RCG-style sectarian, Lenin actually called on communists to seek affiliation to the Labour Party. In retrospect, we can see that Lenin’s call was when capitalism still had many years to go. Now that capitalism is faced with permanent, terminal decline, the essence of the Lenin line is arguably more relevant today than it was in the 1920s.
Lenin stood for fighting the opportunists in the Labour Party, not for destroying it. A good example of the Lenin approach was the recent support that the CPGB majority gave to Diane Abbott in the Labour Party leadership election. What the left will have to learn is that the coming energy decline, which will follow the peaking of world oil production, will demand from communists even more flexibility than Lenin needed in his time.
Cuba
Cuba
Gangrene
The critical letter (‘Campaign to end BBC bias on Palestine’, September 30) against the BBC Panorama programme about the Israeli interception of the flotilla convoy conveniently forgets the context of the Israeli interception.
A selective blockade exists because Hamas controls Gaza and is at war with Israel. The Israeli blockade aims to prevent Hamas being re-equipped with military equipment supplied by Iran. It’s really quite simple. The long list of signatories is a long forgetting of this obvious point. Strange how the left overlook this when it stares them in the face. But they want Israel destroyed so their attitude is ‘Hey, why not let Hamas have carte blanche?’
The left critics of Israel end as a conduit for Hamas and Islamic militants who were clearly shown on Panorama acting as a cell within the convoy. Whilst the majority of boats in the convoy went peacefully to have their supplies (mostly out-of-date and useless) delivered to Gaza via safe ports, one boat load of Islamists were preparing ‘for martyrdom’. There is a bias amongst those on the left who wish to see the Arab-Israeli conflict in simplistic terms, having patronisingly adopted the Palestinians as the ‘victims’ and demonising the Israelis as the ‘persecutors’, whilst the ultra-left become the ‘rescuers’. But this leads us not to a two-state, mature, political solution to the problem, but a sleight of hand accommodation with the Islamist agenda of using covert psychological metaphors, which do no justice to social reality. The ultra-left does not really want peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It supports jihad: the eradication of Israel from the map. That is why the Morning Star and Socialist Worker are soft on Iran. The Panorama programme surprised me because its coverage showed up the extent of the bias towards Hamas, which has crept, like gangrene, into the heart of left politics in this country.
Gangrene
Gangrene