Letters

Get together

Three competing platforms have been drafted and circulated in advance of Left Unity’s founding conference, scheduled for November 30. Of particular interest to us in the Socialist Party of Great Britain is the so-called ‘Socialist Platform’. Participants of our party’s web forum have observed that this platform has many similarities to our own ‘Object and declaration of principles’, and there has been discussion about whether or not we should officially approach Left Unity to propose a meeting to discuss their statement and ours.

A letter has been drafted which the EC may wish to consider:

“We have read your ‘Statement of aims and principles’ for the proposed ‘Left Unity Party’ and have noticed many similarities with our ‘Object and declaration of principles’ and the positions we have developed and propagated over the years. We have in mind in particular the need for a principled, explicitly socialist party that concentrates on campaigning for socialism, as “capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority” and which holds that “the socialist transformation of society ... can only be accomplished by the working class itself acting democratically as the majority in society using both parliamentary and extraparliamentary means”.

As there can be no point in two socialist parties in one country, we should like to propose a meeting to discuss the principle of a single socialist party, based on sound socialist principles, as opposed to forming yet another leftwing reformist party. It was generally agreed to send a letter to the Socialist Platform. It was suggested that if they turn us down we can send an open letter.

Motinn 30: The party sends a letter to Socialist Platform proposing a meeting to discuss the principle of a single socialist party. Carried (5-0-0).

Get together
Get together

Put off

Paul Demarty reports it being argued at the September 14 Socialist Platform national meeting that if journalist Susann Witt-Stahl was allowed in, “then that would have to apply to the comrades outside from the Socialist Party of Great Britain, who were handing out leaflets. As if their presence was somehow intolerable!” (‘Politics of prejudice’, September 19).

Thanks for speaking up for us, but the ironic thing is that if the three of us had been allowed in and had had a vote (which we didn’t want - we only wanted to be there as members of the public at an open meeting, and don’t believe in ‘entering’ other organisations anyway), we would have voted against all the CPGB amendments and they would not have been carried.

The amendments (workers’ state, gradual withering away of money and the state, a European army, etc) would have converted the Socialist Platform into a Leninist document when this is the last thing that’s needed. That would have put people off - and rightly so.

Put off
Put off

Get a life

This week’s copy of the Weekly Worker is only the second I’ve received since becoming a subscriber. What a contrast between the two! The first contained an excellent article about anthropological evidence supporting Engels’ view on the origins of women’s oppression, an interesting discussion on the legacy of Luddism and an amusing take on the ‘safe spaces’ policy produced by some comrades within Left Unity.

The second, on the other hand has five pages - five pages, comrades - devoted to the CPGB’s attempt to amend the Socialist Platform statement at a meeting last Saturday and the debate that subsequently took place. Another page is then taken up with a report of the Stop the War Coalition’s annual general meeting that devotes its first two paragraphs to a list of runners and riders involved in the Socialist Workers Party and its offspring, and then goes on to describe the behaviour of the “bureaucratic clique which runs the Stop the War Coalition” . So half the paper devoted to spats between the CPGB and others on the left and just the back page on wider domestic politics.

I wonder how many CPGB members know what led to the formation of the Christadelphians in the 19th century, why the Congregationalists and Presbyterians merged in 1972 or how many types of Methodism there are? Before they scream that these questions are irrelevant, they may want to reflect on the fact that more people go to church every week in Britain than attend socialist meetings and the membership of all the above denominations is almost certainly greater than that of the CPGB.

The point, of course, is that the history of Protestantism is irrelevant to the CPGB, and that is fine, but I hope that the analogy might allow them to begin to understand just how irrelevant most of last week’s Weekly Worker was to me.

And that, when we get right down to it, is the crux of the argument in relation to the Socialist Platform statement. How do socialists get our ideas across to people and convince them to join us? How do we persuade the Left Unity conference in November to support the Socialist Platform, as opposed to any of the others? What sort of language should we use and how should we conduct ourselves in meetings?

Can I be permitted to refer your readers to just one of the CPGB’s proposed amendments as a possible aid to answering these important questions. The Socialist Platform statement says: “Under capitalism, production is carried out solely to make a profit for the few.” The amendment proposed by the CPGB was to replace the word ‘solely’ by ‘predominantly’.

Members of the CPGB voted as a block in favour of their amendment, though I would argue it is quite simply wrong. Would any person with a life not have something better to do than propose this amendment? I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which I would have bothered to propose the opposite amendment had the original said ‘predominantly’.

This amendment, like all the others, was proposed in the name of the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB, a democratic-centralist organisation. This was not a situation that most of us envisaged when we signed up to Left Unity, or indeed the Socialist Platform, and the CPGB comrades should have understood and been sensitive to how some comrades would feel. It was extremely unfortunate that one comrade left the meeting in protest at these amendments being taken.

I could go on. The front page is a disgrace, frankly, comrades. It is a personal attack on one comrade and not even a polemic against a group or statement. Why not pick on Chris Strafford from the Anti-Capitalist Initiative who actually moved the agenda that you describe as “Nick Wrack’s rotten method”?

Enough said. I have a life to be getting on with and the CPGB need to get one.

Get a life
Get a life

Simples

Chris Knight is quite right to espouse an openness to the range of sciences, but, of course, on the other hand, we must be wary of reductionism (‘Why is the left so afraid of science?’, September 19). Even within evolution studies, ‘selfish gene’ theory - Chris’s current favourite - is not above criticism. After all, science is about debate and testing, not taking the word of one authority.

Fellow science writer Stephen Jay Gould, for one, has criticised Richard Dawkins for reductionism in making the replication of genes the only force in shaping evolution. In emphasising the importance of gene supremacy, in which Dawkins calls real people ‘lumbering robots’, Gould says Dawkins neglects other mechanisms responsible for the complexity of life. Forces such as the balance of species within a region, the division of one species by separate environments, such as islands, which produces mutation, or change through sudden events in the environment, such as the meteor believed to have destroyed the dinosaurs. In other words, the environment of the gene is important too.

For example, the panda is a species where gene reproduction is actually endangered by evolution. Because of their habitat, pandas have evolved into large, lethargic beasts who have to consume bamboo all day and don’t show much interest in breeding, as zoologists and zoos know only too well.

Chris mentions Winston Churchill, whose suggestion in 1910 about how to handle the feeble stock among the working class owes much to that once fashionable gene theory of eugenics. But, of course, Churchill was doing this not out of a drive to replicate his own genes or eliminate those of other peoples, but due to his commitment to that cultural institution, the British empire. He sought better soldiers and was promoting a greater genetic ‘hygiene’ out of class interest, with which, of course, he identified his own self-interest. Is class interest in our genes?

Let us also stop to consider whether in flirting with biological reductionism - genes, the master - we are not on the cusp of implying that a female urge to replicate must show itself in a genetic passion to care for children to the exclusion of all else.

However, those Darwin admirers, Marx and Engels, didn’t discount that, along with class institutions, the world was made of other things, such as land and mineral resources, or psychology, such as a human interest in happiness, including love of others, such as our children.

Let us learn from science - and anthropology - but not take on ideas just like that. We should indeed be afraid of being simplistic or uncritical - of anyone.

Simples
Simples

Leave it out

I am pleased that the Weekly Worker includes serious articles on science. Socialist ideas, and Marxism in particular, originated at a time, and in a climate, of increasing rational thought and scientific discovery. In his article Chris Knight gives a short but balanced view on The selfish gene (that, unfortunately, the left failed to take in the 1970s), but his excellent article is spoiled by the irrational claim that “Richard Dawkins [is] - a brilliant scientist, but a complete idiot when it comes to anything political”.

Chris: either back this with evidence, or leave the sentence out. Dawkins’ politics are of the centre-left, supporting, as he once said, a Lib-Lab coalition with Robin Cook as leader. Dawkins is strident in opposing ‘creation science’ and continues to campaign for a secular society based on scientific rationalism - a goal opposed by the religious dogmatists that many of the so-called left choose to be in bed with!

Leave it out
Leave it out

Woman question

I was quite impressed with a lot of good assessments/standpoints in Ben Lewis’s ‘Rotten politics and rotten terms’ (September 19) regarding the (really negative) development of Die Linke. They were indeed better than most of what is articulated by German ‘lefties’ (especially Trotskyists), who have, or at least spread, illusions in the party.

But I have to correct one decisive point. Katja Kipping should not be considered a leftwing chairwoman. She was - and still is - the representative of the centre-right current, ‘Emanzipatorische Linke’ and the candidate for chair upon whom the centre-right and the far right of the party could agree. Riexinger, instead, has the same position on the left, but he is a lot weaker than Kipping, because she is an old cadre who developed her politics over many years in the eastern part of Germany - where the right wing of the party is already as social democratic as the SPD. Thus she has a lot of support and credit among the whole right wing.

In particular she uses the ‘woman question’ to get rid of class struggle politics (which is really a bad thing) and replaces proletarian by petty bourgeois feminism (which is also a bad thing). And she has been supporting the so called ‘anti-German’ tendencies inside and outside the party over the years (especially the Israel-supporting ‘Antifa’ in Saxony, where she lived for a long time). Additionally, she and her current (EmaLi) are one of the driving forces behind the ‘red-red-green’ government project. Perhaps Kipping will be the first female secretary of state in Germany.

Riexinger, on the other hand, is supported by grassroots trade unionists on the left wing, the Trotskyist currents (in particular Marx 21) and other social movement people (Blockupy, anti-crisis protests) in the party. He was the chair of the party in Baden-Württemberg, a department in the south of Germany, where Die Linke has been really weak - it has not been represented in the departmental parliament for years. He comes from the western part of Germany, his network is not as old as Kippings’ and he tends to look for compromises far too often.

Maybe this can help to improve the assessments regarding the ‘leading’ figures in Die Linke (some are in power and some are only in leading positions but without power - Gysi and Wagenknecht are even more powerful than Riexinger).

Woman question
Woman question

On the spot

My union, Unite, currently gives £3 million a year to the Labour Party. This would be better spent in employing 100 organisers in the field (£30,000 a year x 100 = £3 million). At the same time, all Unite officials, including Len McCluskey, should be regularly elected and paid no more than a skilled worker.

The demand for a living wage of £10 an hour for all workers, including part-timers, temps, casual and migrant workers, is a ‘wedge’ issue. It puts the union leaders and both Ed Miliband and David Cameron on the spot and on the defensive. It is also a great organising tool to recruit workers to the unions, no matter whether they are young or old, black or white, or originate from eastern Europe or Essex.

On the spot
On the spot