Letters

Nice ideas

Below we reprint one of the letters received in response to our election material, illustrating some common points raised both in writing and on the doorstep

I have just received a pamphlet from the Communist Party. I have some questions regarding your policies that I would like you to answer.

1. Why should minorities have the right to be educated in their mother tongue when the recognised language for this country is English?, What good would it do to educate someone in their mother tongue, leaving them unable to get a job because their English is too poor?
2. A free public transport system accessible to all does sound like a nice idea, but who will fund this?
3. I agree that drug users should not be criminalised for taking drugs. However, they should be punished if they steal or commit other crimes to pay for their addiction. All drugs should certainly never be made legal, which would encourage younger people to abuse them. If drugs were legalised, who would set their price? Will the crime rate go up so that addicts can pay for their drugs?
4. I agree that prevention is better than cure, but trying to eradicate poverty, alienation, unemployment and social fragmentation would be an almost impossible task.
5. A communist country is run by the people, for the people. However, I believe it is a country run like all countries, capitalist included, by a few men at the top of the ladder who think they know what is best for the majority.
6. A minimum wage of £275 per week sounds good - but who is going to finance companies when they have to pay such high wages? However if benefit was at £275 per week, I wouldn’t be working and neither would most of the nation. Again, who will finance the high benefit level?
7. Of course with this benefit and with all immigration controls at an end, the country would be over-populated with the hundreds and thousands of people arriving. Where would they live? Who would pay for the houses?

Phil Railston, communist candidate for Strood in Kent, replies:

For communists, capitalism has already created the technical means to abolish want everywhere in the world. What is lacking is the will to do it.

For example, you say that a free public transport system would be astronomically expensive. Transport already is. We have to buy cars, sit in traffic jams, die in accidents, suffer the effects of pollution and pay thousands of pounds a year to be herded like cattle on buses and trains. A rational, free public transport system would work better and cost less.

You fear that if we abolish poverty here the country will be swamped by immigrants and no one will want to work. Communists organise in every country and we demand the abolition of poverty everywhere. Work, not money, creates all the world’s wealth. Work, not money, will abolish poverty. We are for full employment and many hands make light work. Work then becomes a part of a life that is worth living. This is what people will work for. Your fears are groundless.

We oppose immigration controls because they treat people as unwanted bits of machinery, but do nothing to reduce unemployment or poverty. You have to find human answers to human problems.

Likewise with drugs. People who damage their health with drugs need help and treatment, not punishment. On this we agree. Legalising drugs enables society to deal with each problem rationally. Take the two most dangerous drugs known: alcohol and tobacco. Both are legal and their consumption is controlled by very different legislation. Prices are fixed by the market and taxation or, in the case of the next most dangerous category, by doctor’s prescription. We can see that where poverty and alienation are greatest so are the drug problems.

Minorities should have the right to be educated in their mother tongue because people learn quickest and best that way, including how to speak the majority language. They learn English quickly and willingly, because it is to their advantage. This right means treating people with respect, as equals, developing their full potential both intellectually and culturally. Education is not about oppressing anyone, but liberating them.

It is true that since the beginning of class society, many thousands of years ago, the few have dominated the many to secure their own narrow advantage. This is the way the world has developed. With each new level of development human nature has spontaneously changed to take advantage of the new conditions. What is new now is the technical possibility of abolishing want, but only if we produce to meet human need rather than profit. This means the end of capitalism and its replacement by the rule of the working class: the majority. Majority rule in turn will work only if it is based on understanding, and develops through education and practice combined.

Our manifesto needs to be seen as a programme of struggle to prepare the working class for power.

Your comments regarding the ‘communist countries’ being neither a worker’s paradise nor genuine workers’ states are correct, but the project of building socialism by order from the top - that beguiled so many communists for so long - has failed. Socialist planning can only be achieved democratically. In our defence we were the faction that argued that case within the Communist Party for many years before the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now we are all that is left. It is our job to reforge the Party, not to repeat its mistakes.

Helen Avery
Luton

Misleading

The reports on the communist election results (Weekly Worker 93) are misleading with respect to the percentage of the vote received by candidates in Luton and Strood. In both cases there were three seats being contested and only one communist candidate. It would be more accurate to describe the percentage as 3% in both cases. It is also worth noting that in all wards where we stood our vote was comparable to all the other contesting parties except Labour, which was way out in front.

Tom May
Communist candidate in Luton

Reformist vehicle

In its April 28 edition, Militant argues that Tony Blair has become “Tory Blair, indistinguishable from John Major on most policy issues”.

It states: “With the abolition of clause four, Blair will have removed a decisive obstacle on the road of turning the Labour Party into a British version of the US Democratic Party, just another capitalist party.”

Yet this is contradicted the following week by Peter Taaffe, ML’s general secretary, who asserts: “Even the elimination of clause four and the breaking of the links with the trade unions (which has not yet been completed) would not be sufficient to put a minus against the Labour Party as a workers’ party” (May 5).

Apparently what is “more decisive” is “the consciousness, the psychology of the working class ... towards the Labour Party”.

Taaffe believes ML can fill the space left by Labour’s rightward slide. He points to his organisation’s recent inroads into the Labour vote in the local elections and adds that ML “will have the opportunity to develop on an even more dramatic scale”.

Yet he continues: “... we will support all attempts to create a genuine, mass socialist party in Britain. In the future, significant split-offs from Labour are inevitable.”

So it is not the reforging of the revolutionary alternative - a mass Communist Party - that Militant’s leader holds out to us, but the forming of a Labour Party mark II.

Militant Labour has no vision of itself providing leadership for the class. Its own potential growth is seen as a means of putting more effective pressure for reform - and it is keeping open its options as to whether the reformist vehicle will be the Labour Party mark I or mark II.

Ted Jaszynski
North London

Bad joke

It is sad to see Phil Railston (Weekly Worker April 27) bringing up the old ‘Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore all vegetarians are genocidal fascists’ argument to denigrate the beliefs of an ever-growing number of people, not only in Britain, but all over the world. Not being a communist, but a vegetarian who is a regular reader of the Weekly Worker, I see nothing wrong with the idea that social justice should apply to all creatures, not only humans, and it is speciesism to think otherwise.

Unlike what Railston thinks, it is not a sense of moral superiority which spurs us to fight for animal rights. It is simply a desire to ensure that, as far as possible within their natural environment, all creatures have a right to a pain-free life. The world is perfectly capable of surviving without the necessity to slaughter millions of animals for food, although to do this we must first pull down the multinational and governmental interests that try to keep us believing that meat is good for you. Then - with a diet free of animal growth hormones, BSE, salmonella, listeria and countless other unpalatable chemicals, organisms and diseases - we can raise the standard of living for the mass of human beings.

Finally, to equate Alan Clark with all manner of animal rights activists, from hunt saboteurs to anti-vivisectionists - to people who simply wish to do what they can to lessen the suffering we as a species cause to other creatures - is, I hope, a bad joke.

Mark Field
Dundee

Modest aid

I have recently returned from Cuba where I met members of the Cuban Communist Party and strong supporters of the government. Others were unsure as to the correctness of government policies.

However, despite these natural divisions, without exception they declared that, despite hardships imposed upon them by the American blockade, they wished to retain the socialist system.

A teacher took us to his school which worked on a two shift system and had 500 pupils aged 16 to 17 years, and 40 teachers.

Teachers and pupils had to share pens, pencils and books. Despite all this and more, the spirit of the teachers was that, come what may, they would carry on the struggle to provide their pupils with a high standard of education, and maintain the benefit of socialism: education free of charge.

The spirit of resistance and self-sacrifice by the ordinary people of Cuba to retain their way of life, of mutual solidarity and assistance, was such a moving experience, that we resolved we would not just sentimentally sympathise, but on our return to Britain would try to assist the Cuban people in some small way. We decided to provide direct aid as soon as possible to the school we visited in the modest form of 100 pens, 125 pencils, 100 erasers and 144 blackboard chalks. Also, a pair of shoes for an ex-pupil who has to borrow shoes from relatives! the cost: £100. We decided on this modest figure on the basis of us having to meet the sum ourselves without outside assistance. If each one of us contributes £10 we cover the £100. If we double that to £20 each, we can ensure that each pupil has their own pencil!

Tom Cowan
South London