Letters

No opt-out

Dave Vincent reminds us once again about the attacks of the last Labour government on the working class (Letters, June 2). Yes, Dave, we know that the Labour leadership is (and always has been) pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist. So when he asks what the trade union link “is delivering for the working class today”, the answer is pretty obvious and pretty much the same as it has been throughout Labour’s history: not very much.

Dave himself has identified one of the main reasons for this. The “union barons” are more concerned about patronage and possible knighthoods than they are for their members’ interests, he writes, which means that the union link “has always acted to dampen down militancy, not get union members benefits”. The same barons “urge members to vote Labour in their magazines and do not allow critical letters to be published about this or the link”. Union leaders - particularly in Labour-affiliated unions, thinks Dave - exercise a “dictatorship” over their members.

This points to one of the main tasks facing rank-and-file members - irrespective of whether their unions are Labour-affiliated or not, actually: the urgent need to organise in order to hold leaders to account, to ensure they act in the interests of the membership or are replaced. In other words, the problem is not the link with Labour at all, but the behaviour and unaccountability of the bureaucracy.

Dave completely writes off the possibility of the left or pro-worker forces making headway in the Labour Party. But he has told us himself why things seem that way and as a result unwittingly indicates how things can be changed. We are unable to make headway at present because the union tops choose not to pursue pro-worker policies and instead cooperate with the rightwing leadership. As I have said, that is first and foremost a question of union democracy and demonstrates the necessity of workers themselves taking control. If we had responsive, democratic trade unions, the leaders would be obliged to fight for change within the Labour Party, not act as the main block against progressive policies.

So there is no short cut in the fight to win a party that really does act in workers’ interests - and certainly not in the way the Socialist Party in England and Wales proposes. If the unions under their current leadership broke away from Labour to form a ‘genuine’ workers’ party (in reality a Labour Party mark two), why would the bureaucracy behave any differently? The new party would just be a repeat of mark one.

Dave tries to convince himself that workers “will only vote [Labour] back in if there is no left alternative”. But you only have to look at May 5 to see that this is not so. Sitting left candidates were voted out in favour of Labour. Dave says: “We need alternative left anti-cuts candidates until the working class come to see the need for a Marxist party.” But that is exactly what we had on May 5 in the form of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, whose results he calls “abysmal”. No, Dave, standing in elections is not a panacea.

He is correct on the need to “establish credibility”. But, once again, how is that to be done? Anything less than Marxism is simply not credible. Just what is our alternative to cuts? Keynesianism? No, that would not take the working class forward one centimetre. The “alternative” is Marxism.

So Dave’s proposal, quoted above, needs rephrasing. We need to fight for a Marxist party in order to stand alternative anti-cuts candidates - if we want them to be credible, that is. This fight is central and needs to be fought in all the organisations of the working class. Including in the unions and in the Labour Party. We can no more opt out of the fight within Labour than we can the fight within the unions.

No opt-out
No opt-out

Organic link

While I generally avoid making comments on issues in dispute on the left 10,000 miles away, my own experience of having lived in Britain in the past, and having been a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists, plus the function and make-up of the New Zealand Labour Party, tends me to agree with Dave Vincent. I think he’s quite right to question just what ‘organic links’ the British Labour Party has with the working class and point out the dangers of confusing the union barons with the class.

I’d also question an idea that Dave’s letter touched on, but didn’t delve deeply into: Labour Party financing. The lazier elements of the left in NZ argued for years that the Labour Party here was mainly financed by the unions. This simply wasn’t true and hasn’t been the case for many a year. In fact, it is predominantly financed by the state, through the allocations of parliamentary services funding. Its next biggest source of funding is business donations. Unions here supply a minuscule fraction of the Labour Party’s total income. I find it hard to believe that the situation in Britain would be completely different.

Perhaps it’s time to look more deeply at how Labour in Britain is funded, in particular to what extent the state underwrites Labour’s total income and expenditure. To do that you’d have to investigate not the party’s official accounts, but the allocations of parliamentary services, or whatever they are called in Britain, to political parties.

You might just find that, as in New Zealand, the primary ‘organic link’ Labour has is to the state, just as its primary loyalty link is to managing the capitalist system.

Organic link
Organic link

Hairy monster

Peter Manson confirms the CPGB’s ‘dual’ or two-party strategy (‘Give up on Tusc’, May 26). I have referred to this before (Letters, April 21) and nobody has disputed it - one party for communists and at the same time an ‘AN Other’ party. Peter suggests an identity for these two parties: “The working class needs its mass Marxist party. But a Labour Party that was an ‘instrument of struggle for working people’ could play a vital role in bringing together partisans of our class in the fight for workers’ power.”

This is no abstract sloganeering. The CPGB’s Ben Lewis calls for industrial action on June 30, combined with the political demand to join the Labour Party (‘Striking together’, June 2). Surely this is not an end it itself, but merely a step to some variation on ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’?

No real surprises here. The British road of the former CPGB had a dual strategy. This was rejected by the current CPGB in its ultra-left phase. Then the CPGB berated the left for supporting calls for an ‘AN Other’ party. They argued that true communism stood for one party alone. Fortunately, this stage of ‘one-club golfing’ passed when the Provisional Central Committee ditched it to back Labour.

I was reminded of the difficulty communists have in criticising anarchist leaders. Since anarchists reject leadership as such, there is no leadership to criticise. One could not criticise the CPGB’s argument for an ‘AN Other’ party simply because there wasn’t one. Some of us did not believe that. Now this second party turned up and called itself the Labour Party!

The ‘debate’ between the CPGB and the Socialist Party is about the ‘AN Other’ party. On one side we have Miliband’s ‘New New Labour’ party and on the other we have Bob Crow’s ‘New old Labour’ party. Both have fundamental flaws which each side can expose. Dave Vincent did exactly that in last week’s letters. What we have is Hobson’s choice between two dead-end parties.

Backing the conservative Labour Party means ignoring decades of the practice which contradicts the CPGB theory of Labour as “an instrument of struggle for working people”. Peter’s view that Labour “could play a vital role in bringing together partisans of our class in the fight for workers’ power” is very Labour Briefing and more Alliance for Workers’ Liberty than the AWL. On the other side, in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, we have the theory of spontaneity, or making it up as we go along. Workers do not need dead-end parties, whether conservative or spontaneist.

It was Peter himself who came up with the alternative in theoretical terms. He produced the slogan of a ‘halfway house party’. Of course, he invented this by accident because he wanted a hairy monster to frighten the children. It worked when the lights were off during the dark night of leftism. Today the monster has been banished by the PCC and children can stop hiding behind their fingers.

Nevertheless, like the apple that fell on Newton’s head, it either makes us frightened or has us thinking in the right direction. A halfway house is not going back to the past in the search of true Labour. It is going forward at least halfway to where we want to be. Since a democratic republic is on the road to communism, then it too is a clue adding to what Peter started. A halfway house party must be a republican party. If this is a working class party, then it is the republican party of the working class. Therefore, neither the Labour Party nor Tusc are halfway houses. If they are houses at all, they are prison houses of the old constitutional monarchy.

Hairy monster
Hairy monster

Can't consent

Grant Williamson (Letters, June 2) has very strong opinions on the definition of rape. He states: “... forcing a person against their will by physical force, threat or other coercion to have sex when they don’t want to. That is what rape is.” He relies on a ‘common sense’ notion of rape; ‘common sense’ is notoriously likely to be based on reactionary ideas.

The current legal definition rests on the question of consent, not physical force, because the victim’s willingness to potentially sustain further injury in a fight is not on trial. The onus is on the (overwhelmingly usually) man to have a reasonable belief that the (overwhelmingly usually) woman consented to his actions. This emphasis on consent is why people under 16 are described as having been raped - because they do not have the capacity to consent, just as they can’t consent to surgery or getting tattoos.

But Grant does not discuss our attitudes to young people’s sexuality outside of this narrow legal framework. He does not define what he means by ‘sex’, but, under the previous legislation which he seems to think was better, it meant ‘penis in vagina’. Not ‘broken bottle in vagina’ (a disturbingly common phenomenon), not ‘penis in mouth’.

It is ‘penis in vagina’ because rape legislation was originally a form of property law, not concerned with injury to the victim so much as damage to her husband’s property: her capacity to produce legitimate heirs to inherit the rest of his property. By shifting the narrow definition of ‘sex’ to one of considering the damaging physical and psychological effects of sexual violence, the (only partially successful) attempt was made to address the experiences of victims more sympathetically. Obviously, reducing women’s sexual behaviour to granting or withholding permission to have things done to us is extremely limited, but not at the top of many people’s list of priorities for change in an area with so many more pressing issues.

From the tone of his letter, Grant seems to believe large numbers of teenage boys are incarcerated for having consensual sex with their girlfriends. I have never seen any evidence of this. I have seen surveys showing that one in three girls are sexually assaulted at school, that 42% of young people in Britain know at least one girl who has suffered physical violence from a boyfriend, and that 40% know at least one girl who has suffered sexual violence from a boyfriend. Equally disturbing are the figures showing that large numbers of young people believe this kind of male violence to be acceptable; 27% believed a boy could expect sex with a girl who had been ‘flirtatious’ (Amnesty International, 2006). But we are told the real victims are not girls, but young men.

Grant then goes into some detail concerning the high numbers of what he believes to be completely unjustified complaints and convictions of rape. This is an absolutely bizarre interpretation of the facts. In anonymous surveys, around a quarter of women say they have been raped. The majority (80%-90%) of cases are not reported; of those that are, most are not prosecuted, resulting in a conviction rate of about 6%.

I am looking forward to the day when I will read something in a socialist paper written by a man giving his unconditional support to women who suffer male violence. It is a depressing experience to be able to predict the response of the left press as being a series of obfuscation, qualification and minimisation; this paper has reported the Slutwalk circus in terms virtually indistinguishable from the mainstream media. No surprise to find the only way women claiming their right to self-determination is made acceptable is when its dominant image is one of sexual availability.

More than two women a week are killed by their male partners in this country; all we get from the left is the resentful defence of male privilege and some feeble hand-wringing. It is insulting to focus on an abstract aim of ‘left unity’ when you are prepared to tolerate this level of male violence against women in virtual silence.

Can't consent
Can't consent

Political status

There will be a lobby of Sinn Féin’s conference marking the 30th anniversary of the hunger strike at 12 noon on Saturday June 18 at London Irish Centre, 50-52 Camden Square, London NW1. We will be calling Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to support the demand for political status now.

The hunger strike shaped the course of history, says Gerry Adams in the blurb for Sinn Féin’s conference, implying that the hunger strikers would have supported the Good Friday agreement (GFA) and Sinn Féin’s acceptance that the conflict was about loyalism’s ‘legitimate concerns’ (that they might have to concede equality to nationalists) and not about the occupation of the six north-eastern counties of Ireland by the armed forces of British imperialism.

Stiofán Ó Morna has written a horrific account of what happened to Harry Fitzsimmons in Maghaberry on May 29: “Harry’s cell was entered by the riot squad; there had been no confrontation, no exchange of words, just brutality. His glasses were smashed into his face with such force that Harry believes there may be glass in his eyes. He said it is definitely in the multiple lacerations in his face. The thugs held him, while others punched, kicked and tore his clothing from his body.”

Now tell us that Bobby Sands and his comrades would not have championed the right to political status for Harry and all his comrades in Maghaberry and elsewhere today. This conference cannot even mention that there are Irish prisoners-of-war today - in the exact same position, fighting the exact same battles as 1981 and the years preceding and following those hunger strikes.

But there is inevitable resistance. ‘Dissident’ republicans recognise that British imperialism is dividing the Irish people by force and continue to fight for the expulsion of the forces of the crown.

The fight for political status is intensifying inside the prisons - the very thing that the 10 hunger strikes died for 30 years ago, which was abandoned 13 years ago with the signing of the GFA. The Belfast Telegraph reports from Maghaberry: “The jail protest is about a number of issues - strip searches, lock-up times and freedom of movement inside Roe House, where on two landings more than 30 dissident prisoners linked to a number of groups are held ... Some of those prisoners are now involved in a so-called dirty protest. Others have been involved in ‘hand-to-hand fights’ with prison officers in recent days” (May 26).

The GFA has not improved the relationship between the communities in the north of Ireland. In Belfast, according to Henry McDonald in The Guardian, “There are now 80 permanent barriers dividing loyalist and nationalist areas of the city, according to a report by the Community Relations Council in Northern Ireland. In 1994, when the troubles were declared over, there were 26” (July 28 2009).

The GFA has legitimised sectarian bigotry. This has made the unification of Ireland far more difficult. We demand that the participants in this meeting take their responsibilities to today’s republican prisoners seriously, fight for their political status and that Sinn Féin cease imposing severe economic austerity on the working class and the poor, which is bound to exacerbate community tensions.

Political status
Political status

Facts

A couple of factual points regarding JP Nettl and his political sympathies (‘The study of history and the left’s decline’, June 2). Firstly, he was a supporter of the Labour Party. I heard him address a Labour Party election meeting in 1959 in Shipley. Secondly, he contributed a book review to International Socialism in 1964 (www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1964/no016/nettl.htm).

Facts
Facts