Red Left Review

Should labour councillors refuse to implement cuts?

2011-01-08T03:45:00.001-08:00

I know that there have been petitions calling on Labour councillors to join with trade unions and community groups to fight the cuts [1] which presents an interesting question: should the anti-cuts movement call on Labour councillors to refuse to implement cuts?

The issue raises historical examples where Labour councillors have been pushed by local campaigns to oppose cuts in defiance of the law, the most famous example being Poplar in the early 1920s resulting in the jailing of 30 labour councillors for six weeks after these councillors funded services by refusing to pay general rates to London-wide services [2].

The argument in opposition to comparisons of this kind is that councillors have to set a legal budget, or the council’s designated section 151 officer - who has the role of overseeing council budgets - will do so. Better that labour councillors make ‘humane cuts’ than they be enforced ‘inhumanely’ by the section 151 officers [3].

This raises a question about the kind of movement that can fight and win this battle, how should the movement orientate itself? Adopting Neil Kinnock’s “dented sheild” policy of implementing cuts (however partial) or militant and law-defying tactics like occupations, walkouts and the refusal to implement cuts to break the Con-Dem government?

A militant movement involving Labour Councillors refusing to acquiesce to cuts would show a weak government forced to enact policy via unelected officials while highlighting the shallow nature of 'democracy' within Capitalist society and the role of the state in enforcing cuts in the complete absence of any popular mandate.

We should have no illusions that such a movement won't be met with opposition from the Labour Party leadership, in Poplar when George Lansbury opposed the government policy in Poplar the Labour Party denounced him while Kinnock condemned the advocates of mass non-payment of the poll tax as ‘Toytown revolutionaries’. The anti-cuts movement must however provide a space which is open to Labour councillors who refuse to implement cuts while condmening the implementation of cuts from wherever they originate.

Justice for SOAS Cleaners!

2009-06-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

Protests have been called following a raid on the cleaning staff at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) by 40-50 armored police from the Immigration and Border Agency, Communist Students report.

At 6.30am on Friday the 12th the company that sub-contracts SOAS' cleaning staff called a meeting of the employees, having assembled in room G2 the room was raided by armed officers and those present questioned, without recourse to a SOAS Unison rep or translator. The raid took place at the behest of the ISS, the company sub-contracted to provide cleaning staff, and was carried out with the prior knowledge of SOAS management who were present during.

Of those interrogated Unison reports that 9 were arrested for allegedly working without proper documentation, and have since been sent to detention centers. Early reports indicate that a woman six-month pregnant is among those detained, while three members of staff have reportedly been 'fast track' deported out of the UK.

SOAS cleaners have been active in fighting to win union recognition alongside campaigns around wage increases. Worryingly early reports suggest that at least one member of staff has been threatened with deportation to Columbia, a country known to be particularly dangerous for trade unionist activists.

Around 100 students, allies and fellow SOAS staff gathered outside the main building at 8.30pm prior to a Unison emergency branch meeting. Following this public protest students occupied the university building and have issued a series of demands to SOAS management, including the release of the remaining detainees still held in detention.

www.freesoascleaners.blogspot.com

Please take a few moments to send messages of solidarity to freesoascleaners@gmail.com and protests to SOAS principal Paul Webley at pw2@soas.ac.uk. This is vitally important and urgent.

Revolution betrayed?

2009-06-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

I have recently started reading a new biography of Ernest Mandel by Jan Willem Stutje, 'A Rebel's Dream Deferred'. Ernest Mandel, as some of you may know, was a Trotskyist leader, part of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from the mid 1940s onwards.

Stutje describes an amusing anecdote about a meeting between two leading members. In 1947 Mandel met with Livio Maitain in Milan, having recently attended the congress of the French socialist youth organisation at which they were first introduced:

Maitan never forgot how Mandel, seeing chalked on walls everywhere the slogan 'Viva Internazionale!', delighedly exclaimed, 'Absolutely incredible! So many internationalists in Italy in spite of the Stalinists and the reformists.' Mandel hadn't realised that 'Internazionale' was simply the name of a big Milan football team.

The Lost World of British Communism (Review)

2009-06-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

The book presents a series of articles, published during a period spanning the 1980s, in the midst of the Miners Strike and a crippling division in the Communist Party of Great Britain. These essays have been collected to mark the 10th anniversary of Samuel's death on December 9th 1996 at the age of 62 and at 'the height of his powers'. The text seeks to view the party of the 1940s through the prism of the same party in the 1980s.

When Samuels was writing these articles a fierce battle was being waged, within a number of European countries most notably Italy, between the traditional 'old guard' often aligned to the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the "innovating" Euro-Communists, rejecting Marxist economic theory, and seeking to appeal to new constituency, creating a new form of popular front policy in the claims of the 'specially oppressed'.

Within the UK the Euro-communists established themselves in positions of leadership within the CPGB, leading eventually to break away factions of hard-liners into separate organisations. The Eurocommunist dominated leadership of the CPGB eventually disbanded the organisation in 1991,before establishing a political thinktank called Democratic Left. The detritus of which then found its expression in Charter 88, an organisation dedicated to 'constitutional and electoral reform'.

Raphael Samuels writes as a long standing member, deeply involved within the tumultuous history of the CPGB. Born into a 'Communist family' during a time in which he suggest membership of the party provided a 'a way of life', he describes a 'complete social identity at odds with the rump of an organisation the CPGB would become in the years before his death in 1996. He markedly contrasts the declining influence of the party to that which he knew as a boy, born in 1934 to a jewish family in London, selling Daily Worker at the school gates. He provides a glimpse of a closed world where, in the words of his partner's preface to the text, "his reading, friendship and social life were all dominated by politics".

Relevance Today

He identifies many characteristic traits that would continue to characterise the left long after the party was over and the struggle between the 'euro-communist' and hard line 'Straight left' but a distant memory to all of the participants.

The organisation portrayed is one in the death throes of its final struggle, as the Executive "expels whole branches, expel honoured veterans and 'screen' new recruits with hardly a murmur" (26). Samuel suggests this merely reflects the 'democratic centralism' of the organisation, with little suggestion of the abuse suffered by the term by these bureaucratic maneuvers since its adoption in the Social Democratic parties of Russia and Germany in the early 20th century.

Samuels gives a glimpse into the interpretation of 'Democratic Centralism' provided by the party in the post Second World War communism, citing 'The Role of the Communist Party' (1957) on 'factions'. The 'training manual' Samuels cites notes that "members ... have not the right to combine with other members in other Party organisations who think like them to conduct an organised struggle for their point of view" (83).

That Trotskyists groupings were to also mimic this distortion of the organisation method suggests that the term for Samuels, as for the far left, serves as a catch-all cover for expedient political manuevering in any given Socialist-tinted organisation. A simplification understandable in the context of a journalistic reading of the movements history or the jockeying for power within a political sect, but not perhaps of someone so deeply engrained within its history seeking to provide a credible appraisal of its history.

Popular Front

Samuels touches upon another defining feature of his involvement in the CPGB, in 1935 the Soviet Union adopted a new position on its relationship with Social Democrats, previously described as 'social fascists' posing an immediate danger to the working class. It now argued for 'Popular Fronts'.

Noting that "previous formulations (had) suffered from a tendency to overate the degree of maturity of the revolutionary crisis" (125 history of CPGB 1927-1941) the comintern leadership now argued for 'popular fronts' that were in fact "only a new name for that old policy, the gist of which lies in class collaboration in a coalition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie" (192 Trotsky on Britain 3rd Vol). Communists involved within these fronts subordinating their political independence to bourgeoise forces within which they were in coalition.

Samuels family had experienced first hand a Communist Party that had by that time entered its 'Popular Front' period. In the mid 1930s the communist parties of the Popular Front had won over-whelming electoral victories in France while in Britain the popular front found initially muted reception in the election of Willie Gallacher as MP in 1935. However it was not until the mid 1940s that the strength of Popular Frontism in the United Kingdom would truly be felt, with the CPGB garnering 103,000 votes in the 1945 general election, electing two Communists alongside a peak member in 1943 of 60,000. Samuels notes the organisations all-time membership peak not in 1943-44 when the Red Army was "sweeping back the Nazi invaders" or in 44-45 when the "Communist led resistance was on the threshold of power in France and Italy" but instead in the "black months" of 1942 when the "Russians at Stalingrad - like the British at Dunkirk were fighting with their backs to the wall" (57).

The political legacy of the popular front would linger on long after its initial adoption. Within the party of the mid 1980s the 'popular front' remained the party's guiding light for both wings, at least in theory. Used by the Euros as justification for a 'Broad Democracy Alliance' (or BDA for short), a debate about which would rage in the pages of Marxism Today in the late 1970s. The popular front was cited as the party's most 'effective strategy' by venerable MT theoreticians such as Eric Hobsbawn, alluding presumably to the height of the party's popularity in the 1940s (38).

Samuels does not diverge greatly from this conception of the Popular Front as reflecting the CPGB at its best. His reproach of the Euro-Communists is the extent that they have strayed from its initial intentions. Samuels notes that the adoption of the popular front were justified, at least formally, on the understanding of the underlying division of social classes, at least formally in the 'theory' provided to justify coalitions with bourgeois forces, a fact that cannot be said of the modern day Euro adherents of the popular front. Samuels also chastises the Euros because the emphasis of an 'alliance' is counter-posed to that of 'Unity'. The comparisons do not withstand the strength of historical analogy, Samuels suggests, comparing the valiant fight of the International Brigades to that of the Euros 'mobilizing the support of the house of lords for the labour government'. Today, a somewhat muted expression of this understanding of the period of the popular front as "British Communism's Finest Hour" is readily apparent in the political discourse of the Communist Party of Britain [1].

That the action of the 1930s Comintern's triumphant rallying cry of the 'Popular Front' had disastrous implications for Spain is clear. Deliberately sabotaging those who had raised the issue of a revolutionary workers' government, this belies the underlining role played by advocates of the popular front during these halcyon days in the party's history. The popular front in fact served to contain social struggle, when the issue of a serious revolutionary explosion presented itself, the reformist leaders seek to limit the actions undertaken, less they alienate bourgeois allies, and break up the established coalition.

Correctness

Samuels characterises both wings of the 21st century CPGB as broadly adhering to a suggested age-old belief in 'correctness', as articulated in the appropriately formulated 'political line' inevitably providing a 'clear lead' if followed and adhered to (23). A role attributed to the snooze-enducing British Road to Socialism, despite the evident lack of interest Samues notes from anyone outside of the limited remit of the party cadre.

In terms of the self-belief of the membership of the party in this role, he does note a sea change in the sense of urgency among the broad membership of the Communist Party of the 1940s, in which each new event highlighted the 'terrible dangers that lie ahead' (35) to a situation in which much of the suggested dynamism had faded away. As illustrative of this relative decline Samuels cites the comparable role he suggests had been played by the party during the 1985 miners strike, during which he suggests the party conspired to lose leading members, and that of its involvement in the 1926 General Strike, following which party membership "doubled as a result of its activity" (34).

Samuels does not touch upon the many failings of the party's leadership during this period of growth. That a potential revolutionary explosion had been smuggled by the political direction of the soviet led Anglo-Soviet Council's over-reliance upon the existing trade union bureaucracy is largely over-looked. Suggesting that while the party had undoubtedly had great influence during this time its use of this comparative strength had often served to limit the "revolutionary possibilities" glimpsed at within these periods of heightened class struggle.

Trotsky would argue in 1928, in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin's tactical prescriptions, that the policy of the Anglo-Soviet Council had crippled British communism with devastatingly fatal results. The extent to which the failings of British Communism can be attributed directly to the role played by the party during this period remains a subject of debate. Trotsky biographer Isaac Deutscher remains critical of the view that the policy of the Anglo-Soviet Council had been the "basic cause of the prolonged impotence of British communism" which remained "vegetated" on the fringes of British politics 30 years later (186 Unarmed Prophet). That 1926 reflected the closest Britain had moved to the brink of revolutionary during the inception of the party remains clear, that had a 'correct' line followed the party would have been in a stronger position to give a lead to the most advanced sections of the working class is also not in doubt.

Conclusion

Samuels work is of continued importance to Marxists alive today precisely because the lessons we can draw from the experiences of the CPGB during its height have still not been learnt. If there is a central point we can draw from Samuels text it is that the political independence of the working class must still be stressed in opposition to sections of the bourgeoisie and labour bureaucracy.

Modern Trotskyism, as manifested in its many myriad expressions is itself an expression of the failure to learn these lessons. The experiences Samuels documents have instead been replicated on a ridiculous micro-scale by the Trotskyist left of the 21st century. We find this within the political bankrupt Respect project of the Socialist Workers Party, and the ease with which basic demands of republican democracy have been downplayed by the existing Trotskyist left as "abstractions" within both the Socialist Alliance and more recently the NO2EU campaign.

Again this point is made not to draw crude historical analogies with the CPGB at its height. It would be wrong to suggesting the failures of the CPGB may be directly compared with those of the existing left. However the clear need for political independence of the class from the bourgeoisie has been repeatedly demonstrated by the defeats that have resulted from such class-collaborationist out-fits.

Meanwhile the abstentionism of another section of the 'orthodox' wing of British Trotskyism flies in the face of the advice of Trotsky to his supporters in the 1930s. Trotsky suggested, during the so called 'French Turn', to join the socialist parties that were participating in the people's front in to work with leftists in them. In doing so Trotsky utilised support for candidates standing against the Radical Party to oppose the coalition policy and reassert the importance of the political independence of the class in this support.

While the tactics adopted must remain reflexive and able to adapt to concrete situations, It is this guiding principle underlining our tactics that must continue to direct our politics as Marxists. These are lessons we must not only draw from the history of the CPGB but must now more than ever seek to apply to the engagement of Marxists not within short-cuts attempts to building left-tinted populist organisations and fronts but a unified Communist party, able to effective assert these principles. What is called for now is the unity of Marxists as Marxists.

United Campaign Against Police Violence launch meeting

2009-05-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday 5th May around 100 people gathered at Friends Meeting House, Euston for the public launch of a new initiative entitled the 'United Campaign Against Police Violence' (UCAPV).

A press release issued before the meeting outlined the provisional committee of the campaign as composed of delegates from organizations established by the friends and families of people who have died in custody alongside Socialist Worker Party, Green Party, Labour Representation Committee and Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers (London Region) and Public and Commercial Services Union representatives.

The meeting opened with a brief introduction by the chair, a Socialist Workers Party comrade. He noted that the campaign is borne of the police violence of the April G20 demonstrations, at which police officers randomly searched and brutalised protesters, alongside the close scrutiny of police tactics that has followed the death of Ian Tomlinson in London's financial district while on his way home from work.

The role of UCAPV the comrade argued is to act as a coalition of many different organisation to come together over many issues, suggesting that "our strength is in our breadth".

The primary focus for the three week old organisation the comrade stressed is the upcoming demonstration on May 23rd at Trafalgar Square. At this demonstration it is hoped protesters will be able to surround and thus 'kettle' Scotland Yard. A reference to the police tactic utilized at the G20 protests to contain crowds of protesters within a limited areas.

Differences
The first speaker from the front table was Deborah Coles, co-director of 'Inquest', an organisation launched in 1981 to campaign against deaths in custody. Deborah noted that this year is the 30th anniversary of the death of Blair Peach, an activist that sustained injuries eventually leading to his death following a police charge during an anti-fascist demonstration. .

The second person to speak was Jenny Jones, member of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) and Green Party London Assembly Member. Jenny suggested the UCAPV initiatives focus should include bring about change within Metropolitan Police Authority organisation, suggesting a sea-change since the death of Ian Tomlinson during which "even the tories" have been "asking difficult questions". Jenny suggested that we should welcome a situation in which people of all political hues were calling for an "end to brutality" and greater scrutiny of the police.

Jones suggested that there were things she could and couldn't say on the Police Authority, she could not suggest that the organisation either sort itself out or disband but she could argue for a review of the general policing culture. These were differences in tone, Jones argued before arguing that the focus of the campaign should be in translating the anger people rightly felt into "tough questions" for the police, alongside other 'critical' voices on the police authority, like the Liberal Democrat representatives.

Martin Smith, national organiser of the Socialist Workers Party spoke soon after. His comments contrasted markedly in focus to those of Jenny Jones, rightly apportioning blame not only to the individual policeman or woman but at the highest level, observing the continued relevance of the Italian proverb that "fish rots from the head". Comrade Smith noted that the role of the function of the police is one that seeks primarily to defend private property, at the expensive of those they are said to "serve and protect". However Martin did not extend his analysis to the implications for the campaign's initial focus; whether the campaign should focus upon reforms within the MPA, for example, is not a topic he touched upon. Surprising given the suggestion within Socialist Worker in November 2007 following the shooting of 27 year old electrician Jean Charles de Menezes that "the Metropolitan Police Authority should be disbanded" [1].

Following this point Comrade Smith asked rhetorically if anyone in the room had "ever seen the police support a strike?" before noting that the police "represented those in authority". In doing so Martin Smith chose not to dwell upon the the 'illegal' strike action undertaken by the Prison Officers Association in 2007, nor its call for the insertion of support for strike action in an amendment to a composite proposed to the TUC conference of 2008. That the comrade chose not to do so is perhaps not surprising given the divisive implications for the left of strike action among those who are part of the state's institutions of repression.

Comrade Smith mirrored the sentiments of the chair and the material for in the meeting in suggesting the upcoming demonstration would be a chance to put 'thousands on the streets of the capital' in opposition to police violence. In an approach suggesting that, in the words of the leaflet for the upcoming action: "mass mobilisation will be the key to our success". In the context of escalating police brutality Comrade Smith noted the steady "hike in wages" for the police during periods of intense working class unrest, citing the Miners strike of 1984-5 and the General Strike of 1926 as examples of the police being 'brought off' during periods of rising working class consciousness, of which the G20 protests were presumably an example.

Forward

All in attendance, both within the audience and on the front table, seemed rightly disgusted by both the brutal and violent policing of the G20 protests and the injustice faced by the friends and family members who had very movingly described the loss of loved ones at the hands of the police. Given both the emotive nature of the question and building press attention on the tactics the police have recently employed, the need for political discussion regarding the future direction of the campaign and the politics it seeks to adopt seems more vital than ever.

Among those representatives of the provisional committee speaking from the front table there are visible differences of focus in the attention the UCAPV initiative should focus upon. These are differences that were not addressed in a meeting that welcomed no contributions from the attendees. While the chair welcomed the breadth of the campaign as one of its strengths, this is a strength only if it is extended to those not within the immediate remit of its current provisional leadership, especially during these critical formative steps.

The kind of politics we need must take the issue of accountability of the police seriously, linking this to wider questions of democracy.That the Socialist Workers Party has within its involvement in previous broad "united fronts" suggested the demand for the armed forces and police to be “dispersed” and replaced with a workers’ militia is a "utopian" far-left demand abstract from 'existing consciousness' belies the way the organisation, like much of existing left, has failed to take the issue of democracy seriously.

While that the suggested success of the campaign could be measured by actions involving "thousands" is clearly problematic. As the 'Grand Old Duke of York' strategy of the anti-war movement suggests, size alone cannot provide the kind of change in society that is so urgently needed. What can is principled politics and a viable strategy for state power that must accompany any suggested rise in political consciousness in confrontations between workers and the police.

The 'Trade Union Discussion'

2009-04-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

The characterisation of Trotsky as displaying "excessive self-assurance and show(ing) excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work" within Lenin's "Last Testament" has a certain resonance among the existing far-left. It also poses a problem for those whose political project is dependent upon a view of Trotsky as entirely 'at one' with Lenin. That the existing Trotskyist left has extended great effort to emphasize the similarity of their views makes sense in the context of a political environment in which Stalinism had tried to reclaim Lenin as their own, and use his work to excuse their every twist and turn.

Never has the image of Trotsky as the bureaucrat been so contested as during discussions of the 'Militarization of labour' in the early 1920s, a debate arising from the conditions of post-war economic reconstruction at the end of the allied blockade of Soviet Russia.

To provide some context, Trotsky had previously proposed in February 1920 to abandon the "linch-pin" of War- Communism, arbitrary grain requisitioning. A proposal that would be rejected by Lenin and the Central Committee majority. In the words of his biographer Isaac Deutscher Trotsky had attempted to "throw the economy back on to the treacherous tides of a free market" (415. Prophet Armed).* Trotsky would however one month later 'plunge back into the accepted folly' and champion the next phase of a series of arguments that could later only be understood as extending from the logic of continued "war communism", most notably the 'Militarization of labour'. These disciplinary measures were necessary features of a painful ''transitional period'.

At the Ninth Congress of the party Trotsky noted that Militarization is:

Unthinkable without the militarisation of the trade unions as such, without the establishment of a regime in which every worker feels himself a soldier of l labour, who cannot dispose of himself freely; if the order is given to transfer him, he must carry it out; if he does not carry it out, he will be a deserter who is punished. Who looks after this? The trade union. It creates the new regime. This is the militarisation of the working class.

It is in the fall of 1920 that the divergent opinions of Lenin in stressing the role of unions as providing protection against the Soviet state could be heard; divergent views evident within the party expressed themselves in a number of distinct platforms including (besides the followers of Lenin and Trotsky) those of the Workers' Opposition who championed the role of independent union control of industry (102 Cohen). It is in this context that we find Lenin warning that “Our present state is a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformation ... Our state is such that the completely organised proletariat must protect itself against it and we must utilise these workers’ organisations for protecting the workers from their own state, in order that the workers may protect our state ...”

Within 'Lenin' Robert Service gives a perfunctorily brief account of the 'trade union discussion' as largely confined to Trotsky's call for a ban on strikes and 'reduction' of the trade unions to the conidition of state organisations [3:422]. Service argues that the response of Lenin to this call related strongly to the percieved need for unity in the face of the fragile peace within the party leadership restored at the Ninth Party Congress. He suggests Lenin emphasises the 'bureaucratic distortions' that had taken place following October and the continually useful role of the trade unions. Providing a glimpse of a Lenin that viewed Trotsky as "ripping the party apart" in the face of more pressing issues, of which the 'trade union discussion' formed only a part (423). He describes a 'sketchily' reported paraphrasing of the speech on the subject to the Moscow province Party Conference, in the face of a potentially unpopular move in response to short-term vital economic tasks [4:402). Lenin's primary concern remained the unity of the Bolshevik party at all costs. We find a variant of this view within the infamous anti-Communist work of Nicolas Werth. Werth describes Trotsky as the 'principle archietect' of Militirization, Trotsky is said by Nicolas Werth as having explained at his ideas at the Ninth Party Congress, in which we begin to see the outlawing of strikes 'in practice' [5:88] as measures designed to 'restore order' [5:89].

The reaction of the Post-Trotsky 'Trotskyists' on this issue differs dramatically in emphasis but retains as a template of any understanding of the 'trade union debate' the historical features of "War Communism".

Ernest Mandel, a Trotsky leader elected to the leadership of the ISFI after 1946 aruges within 'Trotsky as Alternative' that the concept that would come to be known as 'militarization of labour' can only be understood in terms of the demobilization of a massive Red Army following the end of the allies blockage of Soviet Russia. Labour armies are introduced during this period as a response to the problem of 'mass unemployment' (132). Strongly critical, Mandel does however suggest that Trotsky’s proposal that the trade unions should train workers to take the place of the factory directors in the running of the big enterprises "would be an obvious step in the direction of workers’ self-management” (E Mandel Trotsky as alternative London 1995, p55).

Elsewhere within "Lenin and Trotsky" Ted Grant and Alan Wood describe the 'trade union dispute' as "one episode" in the "whole crisis of the political and economic mode of organisation known as War Communism", and as such indistinguishable from this period (96 Woods/Grant). Grant and Woods describe as "drastic" the measures introduced to "get industry moving, to feed the hungry works and to end the drift from town to country" (96). What is not touched upon in this account is the extent to which Trotsky had initially distanced himself from a key policy of War Communism prior to this advocacy.

In stressing the similarity of Lenin and Trotsky's views on this issue they quote comments to a speech at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in 1920 in which Lenin is quoted as saying "in a country of small peasants, it is our chief and fundamental task to discover how to achieve state compulsion in order to raise peasant production" (97) Grant and Wood defend these actions as undertaken in light of the need to arrest the flow of workers from town to country, assuming the necessary use of 'draconian measures', such as arrest for "labour desertions". Following on from this they note an 'official decree' detailing punishments for this crime after the Ninth Party Congress alongside another issued on January 15, 1920 establishing the very first "revolutionary army of labour" (98).

Grant/Woods do hint at an acknowledgement of the divergent view of Lenin in noting that during the discussion of this question 'small frictions' eventually lead to a "series of divisions" in the party leadership, with not two but "at least" five alternatives being put forward (100). Both Service and Grant/Woods note that Lenin's prime concern remained preventing a split and maintaining the fragile unity of the leadership. It is for this reason that Lenin is said to have opposed Trotsky's proposal to "shake up" the union officials (100).

Of those Trotskyist writers that have written about Trotsky's politics on the 'Militarization of labour' Tony Cliff perhaps goes furthest in seeking to distance himself from them, describing Trotsky's politics during this period as advocacy of "anti-democratic, anti-working-class, “substitutionist” practices". Cliff does not compare the policies outlined by Trotsky during this time with those pursued by Stalin’s in the next ten years, despite the fact that “there was hardly a single plank in Trotsky’s programme of 1920-21 which Stalin did not use during the industrial revolution of the 1930s.” (armed 515).

In suggesting that Lenin and Trotsky were 'at one' on this issue Grant/Woods mirror Robert Service in suggesting that policies that would later be enacted by the consolidated Stalinist leadership had met largely with the consent of Lenin during this time. Ironically as has been noted “nobody had in 1920-21 gone farther than Trotsky in demanding that every interest and aspiration should be wholly subordinated to the ‘iron dictatorship’. Yet he was the first of the Bolshevik chiefs to turn against the machine of that dictatorship when it began to devour the dream” (I Deutscher The prophet unarmed Oxford 1978, p73).

Democracy

2008-09-11T04:37:00.000-07:00

On writing about 'democracy' it becomes clear that this is not a single problem but a complex of problems that permeates many other subjects. To understand the continued importance of taking up the mantel of democracy we must turn to Marx & Engels.

Rather than counter posing democracy to socialism, Marx & Engels saw their task as integrating the two objectively (programmatically and, crucially, in terms of the real mass movement). They began by prioritising the fight to democratise political forms as an integral part of the fight for socialism and communism.

This reading of democracy flows from an understand of democracy as a practice: strongly related to a conception of human capability and confidence through the process of democratic practice, through revolutionary struggles, through people transforming themselves through their activity. For this reason Marx would note the relative progressive nature of the bourgeois republican form of state, as compared with other forms of bourgeois state power, that could provide the class with opportunities for this struggle.

The political activity of the M&E team involves the logical continuation of this view in both the slogans they raised and the politics they fought for, as articulated within the call for suffrage. Marx said of universal suffrage that it could provide the class with a school of development despite the obvious fact that this will remain abused as a play-thing in the hands of the ruling classes and must subsequently be 'set aside by a revolution or by the reaction'.

This is an approach also reflected with their active involvement within the revolutions of 1948, an involvement implying an unambiguous attitude towards democracy and the fight for it to be broadened and taken to new heights.

In applying theory to concrete material conditions, Marx was able during these years to drive the political logic of democratic demands to its conclusion: conflict with bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois-democratic movement, going beyond the realistic and practical stance of bourgeoise-democratic movements in the demands raised.

This manifests itself in a multitude of ways, including within the organ of extreme democracy launched by Marx, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, it championed: “a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific proletarian character”, as Engels said many years later (K Marx, F Engels CW Vol 26, Moscow 1990, p122).

Demands that Marx & Engels raised for widened political democracy - for suffrage, against censorship - were often clearly not demands that in themselves went beyond the limits of capitalism of course, however they helped provide the necessary from through which the 'battle for democracy can be fought and won' as the basis for the realisation of majority rule (Weekly Worker Oct 14 2004).

The point is to 'define consistent democracy in socialist terms, and consistent socialism in democratic terms' (H Draper Karl Marx's theory of revolution Vol I, New York 1977, pp282-283). In doing so Marx was able to recognise that struggles within the state are simply the ways in which real struggles are fought out among the different classes, a fact culminating in the modern state which is thoroughly dominated by the bourgeoisie.

So Marx says the goal of revolution, which is 'freedom', means to make society again again into a community of men for their highest aim, a democratic state (KMTR 100). This means not only democracy in political forms, but also democracy in civil society, economic democracy. In contrast, our understanding of democracy within capitalist society remains predicated upon the distinction of the economic and the political.

We may join Marx in drawing from this the conclusion that true democracy requires a new social content – socialism, that must take as central to its adoption democracy forms that far surpass that which is considered feasible within capitalist society. As has been noted before: "Without a social content there can be no consistent democracy. Without democracy there can be no socialism." (CPGB)

Marxism & Women's Issues

2008-09-11T03:07:00.001-07:00

The emancipation of women has long been been of importance and controversy for Marxists. In this article an exposition of a general Marxist theory of women's oppression will be explored before proceeding to consider the lessons to be drawn from this understanding. In so doing it is necessary to critically examine those attempts on the left to champion an 'anti-capitalist feminism' as the logical solution to this form of oppression, as expressed most recently by the Alliance for Workers Liberty's front organisation, Feminist Fightback.

It is first necessary to briefly examine what is meant by the term 'feminism', particularly given the wide range of meanings that it has been attributed.

A clear definition of what Feminist Fightback takes this term to mean is provided within its founding statement of 2006, in which it declared: "we think feminism is about ordinary women coming together to challenge sexism in their own lives, and to support women around the world demanding their rights". In this founding statement, Feminist Fightback highlight its attempt to reach broader layers of 'women of all ages', implying the founding of a movement that aimed towards broad struggles for "freedom, equality and social justice" [1].

Feminist Fightback would later substantiate this fairly vague statement with a commitment to 'socialist feminism', predicated upon a combination of challenging women's oppression and an equally vague commitment to 'anti-capitalism'. As with feminism, the varieties of 'anti-capitalism', and indeed 'socialism', are many, a point upon which Feminist Fightback chose not to dwell in an attempt to reach those 'broader layers' the founding statement touches upon.

It is crucial for us to oppose the suggestion that feminism is able to adequately provide a solution to the root causes of women's oppression, as well as the claim that feminism is able to adequately explain its origins. Feminist Fightback's support for feminism is substantiated by the acknowledgment that while many female revolutionary figures of the twentieth century rejected 'feminism', citing revolutionary heroines such as German communist figures Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg, it would be "sectarian" for socialists today to do so, following the advent of Stalinism in Russia and movements of 'socialist feminists' during a period of second wave feminism [2].

The term 'feminist' arose for the first time in the 1890s, brought about by movements focusing largely upon the promotion of equal property rights and access to education, and eventually, movements calling for the extension of the right to vote to women.

These movements were sharply criticised by the female revolutionary figures Feminist Fightback cites. These revolutionaries rejected feminism while waging fierce polemical attacks in defence of a commitment to the principle of the right of women to vote, to engage freely in political activity and other basic rights. These remained principles intrinsic to a project distinct from that perused by 'feminist' movements.

Rosa Luxembourg is one such female revolutionary figure, indeed arguably one of the most important revolutionary female figures of twentieth century political history. An activist for the revolutionary transformation of society, she also rejected the politics of feminism. Writing before the ascendancy of a Stalinist bureaucratic control of the Soviet Union, Luxembourg would distance herself from an explicit commitment to 'feminist' politics, agitating against the suggestion that such politics could adequately resolve the inequalities facing women.

This does not mean that Luxembourg ignored women's oppression. She famously attacked the reformist-dominated Belgian Social Democrats for dropping their call for women's suffrage, understanding this as a basic demand that the state must be forced to grant, not voluntarily, but through political pressure. Luxembourg did not view these issues within a political vacuum, instead viewing among socialists the abandonment of demands pertaining to women (such as the right to vote) alongside the abandonment of revolutionary methods.

Women's suffrage is, on this account, viewed not just as the goal of women but a common class concern for men and women of the proletariat within the broader context of an explicitly communistic struggle for political power. Luxembourg made it quite clear that the absence of any semblance of political rights for proletarian women is an injustice but that:

"we do not depend on the justice of the ruling classes, but solely on the revolutionary power of the working masses and on the course of social development which prepares the ground for power".

It is for this reason that Luxembourg suggests the "mass struggle for women's political rights is only an expressing and a part of the proletariat's general struggle for liberation", women's suffrage is supported because this "hastens the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat", not as an adjunct or issue in any way distinct from this project. As distinct from our Feminist Fightback friends, Rosa Luxembourg understood the need for the kinds of demands posed by women's oppression to be linked necessary to an adequately rigorous and principled revolutionary strategy [3].

This is a view shared by other female revolutionists of this period, such as Russian revolutionary leader Nadezhda K. Krupskaya. Krupskaya notes that the commitment Rosa Luxembourg expressed to advancing a stated dedication to women’s suffrage was shared by Lenin in his report on the International Congress in Stuttgart, condemning the practices of the Austrian Social-Democrats in putting off the struggle for these electoral rights for women [4]. While raising these slogans expressing a commitment to women's rights Lenin made it clear that it the source of this oppression is capitalism, not a lack of rights. In contrast to feminists of this period, for Marxists the oppression of women is understood as impossible to entirely remove within the confines of a capitalist society, extending from an analysis of oppression as embedded within the material relations of class society. This is an understanding that extends from the analysis provided by the most influential contributors to modern Communistic thought, Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels.

Karl Marx

Support for the equality of the sexes and the championing of women's rights run through-out both the writings of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels and those subsequently inspired by these works. Marx cites the words of utopian socialist Francois Fourier in arguing that the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation of any society, in a discussion of the nature of communist society, while Engels would expand upon the nature of the nuclear family and its implications for women within 'The Family, Private Property and the State'.

In this work Engels highlights that it is not the case that the oppression of women has occurred in all human societies, indeed it is possible to observe relative equality within pre-class societies. Within what Engels describes as 'primitive communism', a degree of right to basic resources and as such embryonic equality is noticeable, due in large part to the fact that the sexual division of labour carries no subordinate social status, as it would later do so, with the emergence of class division. Within a system of 'primitive communism', the role of women in the production process afforded a degree of political power within society.

If we accept this premise it poses the question: what were the circumstances in which we may begin to see the emergence of class society and what were its logical consequences for women and the family? It is possible to understand these changes in human social organisation according to both how people gain their livelihood: the particular mode of production in that society, the sexual division of labour, and the subsequent implications for the political power of women.

A number of changes may be observed over time, including technological advances creating a situation in which a 'social surplus' is created which is then appropriated by a minority, creating a division of class. Engels notes that with the first iron plough drawn by cattle, large scale agriculture became possible, creating a comparatively unrestricted food supply. This marked a turning point in which production for use to production for profit became increasingly prevalent.

Accompanying the development of private property, production transferred from the household. The decline of household production took places as capitalists invest money accumulated via trade in the production of goods, marking the growth of wage labour alongside a decline in household production, with dramatic effects on the nuclear family. The proletarian family increasingly characterises domestic life under capitalism in contrast to pre-capitalist, multi-generational family forms defining the ‘early days of the industrial revolution’.

It is for these reasons that the family became the compulsory, patriarchal family of class society, as child rearing becomes increasing tied to the social oppression of women.

The reasons for this development relate to the needs of these new social forces: men of wealth required sons for the transmission of that wealth, and the primary function of the legally wedded wife was to be the breeder of heirs to a man's property. With the predominance of private property over common property, and with the interest in inheritance, father right and monogamy took the ascendancy and marriage became more than ever dependent on economic considerations.

Alongside the rise of class society is the rise of inequality, as the surplus created is initially shared instead of being accumulated by any one individual. Surplus grew alongside inequality as the position of the male is consolidated as the "head" of the nuclear family household for the purpose of inheritance, the passing on of property accumulated within the production process. This creates the 'double burden' of domestic and childcare work alongside waged labour for many women. With the division of social class the family emerges alongside what is described as the 'worldwide-historic defeat of the female sex'.

An understanding of the nuclear family as a product of particular historical circumstance, and as such subject to potential change, must serve as the basis for the furthering of communistic demands pertaining to women's issues. Marx notes in the German Ideology that "It is with the abolition of private property that the abolition of the family is self-evident". In drawing this conclusion we as Communists argue that women's oppression can only be ended when relations of production on which it depends are overthrown .

Soviet Union

Feminist Fightback argue that there exists a "the massive regression in political culture which Stalinism and social democracy brought about on this issue", but to understand the emergence of Stalinism and its consequences for the family and issues pertaining to women, it is necessary to understand the material basis of this regression in 'political culture'.

The coming to power of the Bolsheviks following the 1917 revolution would create a situation in which substantive gains for women were possible, including the removal of infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality, restricting divorce and surrounding it with disgusting formalities, denying recognition to children born out of wedlock, enforcing a search for their farthers, etc. As Lenin noted at the time, these remained laws "numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, are to be found in all civilized countries" [4].

The removal of old laws that kept women in a position of inequality as compared to men remained progressive developments; the October revolution resulted in political and legal rights in equality with men in sharp contrast to that which has and had been achieved by any government before and after it. However the achievements that were gained by women within the Soviet Union would soon be clawed back by the increasingly bureaucratic Stalinist leadership.

The attempt to 'abolish' the family in a context of generalised want resulted in a situation in which the laws introducing formal legal equality concerning the family and marriage established by October revolution were subsequently mutilated by vast borrowings from the laws of bourgeoisie countries. Resolutions celebrating the 'complete and irrevocable triumph of socialism in the soviet Union' were made all the more cruelly ironic by the introduction of laws challenging some of the more important civil, political and cultural rights of women, including the right to abortion. Prohibiting abortions served to criminalise working women, servants, peasants wives, namely many of those most vulnerable within the Soviet society.

As Marxists we view the condition of women not in isolation, but inseparable to and from the particular development of individual societies. Rejecting he abstraction provided by Feminist Fightback, the 'degeneration of political culture' may only be understood in the reference to the needs of the ruling stratum in creating a 'cult of the family' in which a stable hierarchy of relations could be ensured in support for authority and power of the Stalinist mis-leadership. This bureaucratic distortion of Stalinism in no way implies that it is "sectarian" to not support the political project of feminism. A project soundly rejected by principled female revolutionists before the advent of Stalinised rule within Russia.

While acknowledging that the subordinate position of women is the result of the capitalist system, implying a system of exploitation and division of labour, and that women can only be liberated fully when capitalism is overthrown and replaced by communism, this does not mean however that Communists simply wait for communism. The role of Marxists is clear in fighting for full equality, demanded alongside the defense and extension of existing rights.

Revolutionaries involve themselves in the struggles to advance equality as intrinsic to a wider project of human liberation. Our solution is that provided by Marxism in liberating and unifying those directly oppressed and exploited by capitalism in the fight for a politics able to end this exploitation and oppression. In so doing, we fight for an organisation that can successfully bring about the material conditions for the end of oppression and divisive capitalism.

The role of the revolutionary is to act, in the words of Lenin, as:

the tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; ... able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; ... able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

[1] Feminist Fightback, Founding Statement

[2] http://socialistyouth.org.uk/page.php?4

[3] Rosa Luxembourg, Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle

[4] Lenin, The Emancipation of Women

Sheila Rowbotham at 1968 and all that

2008-05-15T08:56:00.001-07:00

Professor of Gender and Labour History, Sociology at the University of Manchester, Sheila Rowbotham spoke to a crowded gathering of attendees of '1968 And All That' on the topic of 'The personal and the political in 1968' discussing the way events in 1968 shaped her work and philosophy. The central focus of Sheila's talk remained the political and cultural influences on a broad school of 'second wave' feminism developing in a period following the summer of 1968, within which she played an instrumental part.

Readers may be aware that Sheila has faced the prospect of forced retirement from the University of Manchester, inspiring a facebook campaign opposing the termination of her contract; the publicity the campaign has attracted seemed reflected in the attendance of the event, with many of those present forced to stand due to limited space.

Citing the influence of 'first wave' feminist thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in inspiring conceptions of individual lives dictated by reason as the source of emancipation, Sheila suggested this idea provided an influence to the work of later feminist writers. Sheila cited the work of Doris Lessing, in the formation of what would prove to be a characteristic feature of second wave feminism: the importance of 'personal experience' as the subject of political discourse. The influence of 1968 was to provide a language in which to discuss the importance of these experiences, a language that would prove highly influential to later Women's Liberation movements.

Sheila noted that the existence of revolutionary heroines such as Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxembourg were figures that did not come across as having "personal feelings" and if they did, as she conceded, this was not "part of what was meant to be said about them". That the revolutionary figures cited by Sheila shunned a confinement to those issues seen to pertain to the domain of women was not a subject that was expanded upon in great depth, unfortunately.

The focus upon personal experience as a vehicle for "willed freedom" implied a focus upon the role of 'individual will' as the agent for social change. Sheila also noted however a problematic implication of 'the will to be free', mitigated as this will is by stratifications of class and its associative implications.

In the context of the escalating Vietnam war and the great swelter of ideas prevalent during 1968s Sheila joined the International Socialist, precursor of the Socialist Workers Party, for eighteen months until it is suggested there were moves to expel her. This involvement coincided with a workerist period in which the IS sought direct influence with the workers movement with the mass entry of members into factory work places. As a consequence of this turn to industry, those seeking to engage in the emergent women and gay liberation movements retained a fractious relationship with the Executive Committee of the IS.

Contributions from the floor highlighted the failings of 1968 inspired second wave feminism to deliver the promise of equality it desired; noting the ability of capitalism to accommodate a focus upon identity politics without dramatically altering its underlining exclusionary and exploitative logic. That capitalism has been able to adopt the rhetoric of women's emancipation to sell everything from cigarettes to soap suggests that capitalism retains a versatility in its search for profit.

In contrast to the decidedly equivocal approach that has been taken in relation to women's issues in the past, communists must serve as the tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects, while viewing such movements as part of the fight for universal human liberation which only the working class can lead.

Galloway on being gay in Iran: fact from fiction

2008-03-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

George Galloway, principle representative of the Respect Renewal organisation, has made a number of statements in recent weeks that should trouble those of us who hold principled support for gay rights a cause of worthy support.

On the Wright Stuff Show on Channel Five, Galloway comments on the Independent story "peers call upon Smith to halt deportation of gay Iranian". The article highlights the potential deportation of a gay Iranian, Mehdi Kazemi, from the United Kingdom and the subsequent struggle to prevent this.

Galloway first comment is that "all the papers seem to imply you get executed from Iran for being gay. That's not true" [1]. To understand the factual inacuracy of this statement an overview of the Iranian legal code is needed.

Were Galloway to examine the legal status of those engaging in same-sex sex acts in Iran he would find that his analysis is far from correct. The legal status of Lesbian and gay men in Iran today is established during a period between July 1991 to November of the same year, during which a modified Iran Criminal Code is ratified [2] Articles 108-140 of this criminal code identify the crime of homosexual and lesbian sex acts and the appropriate punishment for those said to have commited them.

For the purpose of understanding these section of the Iranian Criminal Code three translations have been examined, including that supplied by the Iranian Queer Organisation (IRQO) the Movement for the Establishment of Human Rights in Iran (MEHR) and finally the UN Refuge Agency.

We find within these 32 articles an identification of both particular forms of crime pertaining to gay men and lesbian women (identified as Lavat and tafkhiz and Mosaheqeh) alongside an associated punishment of Hadd.

Within the penal code the term Lavat encompasses an understanding of Sodomy as "sexual intercourse with a male". This remains an act identified as a form of Hadd offense, these are serious offenses identifiable in reference to specific punishments. In this instance it is death to be decided by individual Sharia judges having "confessed four times" to having committed the offense [3].

According to the translation provided by all three documents, the criminalisation of same-sex acts is not limited to sodomy. The Islamic Penal Law also stipulates crimes for Tafhiz, defined here as "the rubbing of the thighs or buttocks" committed by two men. This is a crime understood alongside other forms of homosexual act such as the act of a man "kiss(ing of) another with lust".

These crimes are understood as subject to a form of Ta’azir. Ta'azir crimes are understood as involving punishments ranging from six to nighty nine lashes the first three times, the fourth time however "the punishment ... would be death" [3]

Lesbianism is conceptualised within the Iranian Penal Code as "homosexuality of women by genitals". Defined as 'Mosaheqeh' within the translation provided by the Iranian Queer Organisation [4].

Lesbianism remains distinct from male homosexuality within the criminal code. Feminist authors Julie Dorf and Gloria Careaga note that "legal distinction between gay men and lesbianism is that sodomy is defined as uniquely male" [6].

As for lavat and takfhiz, the punishment for moshahegeh involves a form of Ta'azir punishment, 100 lashes for each party, the first three times a confession is gained, while a death sentence will be issued the fourth time [3].

As the original Independent article notes, Medhi's former partner has been executed within Iran. In response Galloway makes the claim that Parham, Mehdi's boyfriend was hung "not for being crime. for committing. um. six crimes. er. against young men" [1]. Pausing briefly to expand upon this point a number of points are worthy of consideration.

In a statement released by Mehdi he notes that "I was 15 years old when I started dating one of my class mates in school. His name was Parham" [7]. What followed was a relationship that lasted up until the point at which around March 2006 Parham had been arrested and mentioned Mehdi's name to the government under 'interrogation'.

The first point worth making is that there is no way of ascertaining if Parham was executed for the crimes stipulated within the Iran Criminal Code, however this execution was committed in a context in which, as queer organization Outrage! note:

Claims of rape are made to save the family's honour or to save the passive partner from execution, and are part of an Iranian government propaganda offensive to scapegoat and demonise gay people

In this context, it seems a highly credible explanation that Parham was executed for the crime of homosexuality, and his naming of Mehdi as involved in these acts would seem to have formed part of this investigation into this offense.

Speaking at the 2008, March 15th Stop the War demonstration Galloway commented, in reference to protests from the audience, that “the khaki war machine now has its pink contingent” [8]. This remains a slur on those anti-war activists who combine principled opposition to Invasion of Iran with a commitment to the rights of those Lesbian and Gay individuals within Iran George Galloway seems not to recognise.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou1es7fNTpk
[2] http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/2005/December/Homosexuality/index.html
[3] http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid=3ae6b51b8
[4] http://www.irqo.net/IRQO/English/islamicpunishment.htm
[5] http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid=3ae6b51b8
[6] [Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives: 325]
[7] http://www.irqo.net/IRQO/English/pages/43.htm
[8] http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/gallway-and-the-colour-pink/

Socialist Party and the Commanding Heights

2008-03-10T08:22:00.001-07:00

Reading Marxist Economist Rudolf Hilferding on finance capital I came across the Hilferding quote that "taking possession of six large Berlin banks ... would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of large scale industry".

Writing in the introduction to the translation, Tom Bottomore recognises that Hilferding would not equate this process with socialism, instead understanding this as one step on the road towards it, he does however suggest that:

the development of the capitalist welfare states since WW2 has depended very largely on gaining control of the 'commanding heights' of the economy in this sense, and that any further advance towards democratic socialism in the Western societies can only follow the same course (Finance Capital, Hilferding:9)

I presume that Bottomore is working upon the same distinction Hilferding refused to make between the formal 'bourgeois democracy' of the Weimar republic and the proletarian democracy that would be sought to replace it. A view largely in accord with the notion that thanks to the 'socialization' of the economy it no longer become necessary for the state to be 'smashed', but instead "taking it over and extending its role in planning and controlling socialized production" was the necessary step towards socialism (9).

However the notion of 'conquering the commanding heights' of the economy (as a step either towards, or the realization of, Socialism) retains a relevance beyond the fact that it has been "predicated for almost a century by the leaders of the social democratic labour movement" (106 Mesaros)

It was the Labour- entryist organisation, Militant, who argued that Socialism could be achieved by an "enabling bill" passed through parliament. Within Militant issue 767b, 27th September 1985 we find the following suggestion from Rob Sewell:

A Labour government is always elected in times of crisis, when the desire for change is at its highest . . . Instead of bowing the knee to capital and hoping to run capitalism better than the Tories, it should immediately push through an emergency `Enabling Act' through Parliament.

Former Socialist Party member Comrade Michael Wainwright challenged the party to provide a justifiction of the politics in an article titled Marxism and the state: an exchange. Seeking to defend the indefensible the Socialist Party's Lynn Walsh replied with the suggestion that such action must be taken in association with "a plan of production, and workers’ control and management of industry", which of course must be international. That the comrade felt the need to suppliment the demand for the Labour Movement to take control of the "commanding heights of the economy to be nationalised" as a means towards achieving Socialism, with the need for "workers control" is all the more pognient given the relative abscence of any discussion of workers control in articles calling on the Labour government to Nationalise Northern Rock during much of the discussion of the 'looming recession'.

In Issue 517 of the Socialist in a short piece titled 'Shock of Recession draws near' the paper limits itself to favourably quoting Liberal Democrat Vince Cabel, the logical culmination of this politics is an article that would not be out of place among any one of a number of Liberal Democrat Party press releases. The Socialist Party note in the same issue of the paper that at the time the Labour Government was already "effectively part nationalising the bank". Why did it do so? It should come as no suprise to comrades that it would go on to Nationalise the bank "simply as a temporary response to a crisis, to be contained within the overall determination of capital as a mode of control, without affecting in any way whatsoever the fundamental command structure of the system itself" (Meszaros, Beyond Capital: 106).

The justification of this politics from Walsh, which the comrade admits "would not add up to a socialist society" is an understanding of the "partial" nature of Transitional Demands. The only problem being in this instance that the demands are in no way transitional. Rather more ingenious, than the fig-leaf of Transtionalism, is the suggestion by Comrade Walsh that such moves would provide the "social foundations on which the working class could proceed to build a socialist society". This view maintains an intellectual continuum with the politics of the Social Democratic Labour Movement though certainly not with Leon Trotsky.

Student Respect: "Be reasonable, demand the possible"

2008-03-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

The role of Student Respect post Galloway has been an interesting topic of contention among many leftists: what would happen to the formation following its split at a national level we all mused. Prior to this split many of us witnessed long-standing comrades within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) ditching depleted Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) meetings for ‘vibrant’ joint Respect events, Comrades close to the political project of the Socialist Workers Party rebranded themselves as ‘Student Respect members’ within the pages of Socialist Worker and on campuses for the sake of the party’s latest turn.

With good reason too, as SWP Central Committee member John Rees noted in response to Galloway, the SWP has “sunk significant resources into creating Student Respect” [1], without a trace one might have added. The need to substantiate the rationale for such a move with the talk of ‘great gains ahead’ makes political sense in this context.

On that basis in September of 2007 John Rees provided the following suggestion:

(Student Respect) … has had significant electoral success in local colleges and at the NUS conference. Student Respect has reshaped the left in the colleges

We may ask what to make of reports of the recent gains of student Respect in campuses as wide ranging as Essex and Goldsmiths in reference to this quote.

A report in the 8th of March issue of Socialist Worker noted the election of what were billed as a 'left slate' of 7 candidates. Beyond the spin, the gains made at Goldsmiths were not those of the SWP, but instead the rather heterogeneous sounding 'left' [2]. Only two of those elected were actually Student Respect members: Campaigns and Communications Officer, Jennifer Jones and James Haywood, Campaigns Coordinator. Prior to the election Respect were listing only Jennifer Jones and Grace Lally as Respect Candidates under the optimistic sounding heading: “this month we can take Goldsmiths back” [3]. Returning to the Socialist Worker 'Reports Roundup' the conclusion drawn on the basis of this election, namely that “this vote shows that radical politics are winning a massive hearing among students” seems even less assured.

Candidates stood on platforms almost indistinguishable from those of non-slate candidates. There was no direct mention of the subordination of education to the needs of a market economy within the manifestos of the Student Respect comrades; Where mentions of cuts to services do exist, it is only on the basis of the suggested mis-management of a University that "treats our Union with complete contempt" and the need for a better managed Union. Variations of similar themes ran through-out the election manifestos of all contestants. Noting that the union should be a "campaigning force on behalf of all our members" retains very little purchase in a context in which both left and right have adopted similar rhetoric of accountability and democracy, if just for the sake of getting elected.

While the references were different, and i'm certain the intentions varied, both left and right broadly accommodated themselves to the bureaucratic and largely economistic character of left student politics.

The manifesto of Student Respect member Grace Lally noted the sorry state of student politics in reference to the fact that: "Goldsmiths used to be synonymous with radical student activism" [4]. Ironically the comrade has a point.

Were they to probe the issues 'of relevance to students' at a slightly deeper level they may come to the conclusion that reforms identified on the basis of the needs to render education more responsive to a market economy are not a new phenomenon. The 1960s Fouchet Reforms (named after the then Minister of Interior from 62 to 67) proposed to "install more difficult entrance exams, a more intense selection process, and a sort of “second-rate” degrees, which would be available after two years of study" [5]. Opposition to the Fouchet Reforms would form part of the radicalised student movements leading to May 1968. A movement that would influence the role played by students outside of France, popularizing the use of occupations of University buildings.

The comrade politics is all the more interesting in a context in which the slogans inspiring these "radical movements" find little echo among the existing left. We should have no illusions in documents produced during the period, the politics often expressed remained deeply flawed and partial. However, the willingness to engage with the the implications of Modern capitalism for education, beyond simply lamenting its manifesations, is athema to Student Respect's political project.

[1] http://www.labourhome.org/story/2007/9/19/32556/3993
[2] http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14309
[3] http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=1768
[4] www.goldsmithsstudents.com/export/sites/Goldsmiths/upload_gallery/ManiBooklet.pdf
[5] minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/1793/18448/1/GatesVickeryS07.doc

Venezuela & Chavez

2008-03-06T01:51:00.000-08:00

The Weekly Worker claims a unique position on the basis of the majority of the “leftist commentators” who have provided commentary upon a fairly limited section of the ‘progressive’ reforms within the proposed constitutional amendments, at the expense of those which sought to consolidate the arguably substantial power base of the Venezuelan leader (Chavez Suffers Major Constitutional Setback). The WW is quite right to note the absence of an engagement precisely on the ‘democratic deficit’ apparent within the proposed reforms of the Venezuelan constitution.

The role of Marxists on this basis is clear: to understand the nature of Venezuelan presidency and on this basis draw necessarily correct conclusions. Related to this point, Nick Rogers is right to highlight the need for an independent Working Class voice.

In reference to the ability to cultivate such a voice, it is perhaps worth making explicit the fact that “tying the working class and its organizations to bourgeois ruler serves to impede independent working-class struggle”. Related to this point, the need to “establishing the class independence of the proletariat from all wings of the bourgeoisie—no matter how “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” their proclamations [1] remains readily apparent during this process, alongside the role of a revolutionary, internationalist workers party through which this aim may be realised.

The potential for the consolidated power of a bourgeois ruler to in turn be used against an independent working class force may been noted in reference to the fact that “the presidency – no matter who occupies it – remains an institution of the bourgeois state which be it said revolutionaries are in favour of totally abolishing not strengthening” [2] as Workers Power have rightly suggested.

Despite this Workers Power curiously criticise the “modesty” of the proposed reforms for not abolishing the “the 1999 constitution's protection of private ownership of the land, the factories, the banks, the media etc”. Such an approach of course ignores that such provision would be unlikely to be destroyed precisely because these remain intrinsic to the nature of Chavez’s bourgeois political project. The role of Marxists during this process is not to challenge the ‘immodesty’ of such leaders but to instead turn to those organised forces able to play a progressive role within the region, precisely by ‘sweeping away’ the bourgeoisie regime.

[1] http://www.spartacist.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2004/Venezuela-831.html

[2] http://www.workerspower.com/index.php?id=156,1498,0,0,1,0

The Left & the Homosexual Question: Germany

2008-03-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

The reaction of the socialist left to the 'homosexual question' has a rich and varied trajectory, I will attempt to provide a brief outline to some of the main themes. In order to understand the nature of the left's reaction to the issue of what we would now term 'gay rights', an understanding the historical contexts occasioning the call or protection of marginalized sexual minorities is needed.

At the end of the 19th century there occurs a particular tightening of laws in reference to 'homosexual' or same-sex sex acts, this is expressed in the UK in the form of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and within Germany via Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code.

Paragraph 175 of the German Legal code introduced a provision of the German Criminal code from 1871 onwards punishing "unnatural fornication" among "persons of the male sex" as a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment and potential "loss of civil rights"[1].

It may be noted that during a period following the introduction of Paragraph 175 "until Hitler's accession to power in 1933", movements of opposition to the criminalisation of same-sex acts, among both "homosexual emancipation movement" and socialists remained unrivaled in neighboring european states; a fact partially reflected by the petition of the Reichstag by the formation of what has been termed the first "gay liberation organization" in the form of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, formed in 1897 [2]. The extent to which we can logically align this organisation to the political trajectory of "gay liberation" is deeply questionable, yet it’s formation does say something about the response the law engendered from a range of Germanic society.

We find an expression of opposition among socialists expressed by many of the leading members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during this period. August Bebel, co-founder and parliamentary leader of the SPD of Germany was the first politician to speak within the Reichstag against the criminal code in 1989, supporting a petition calling for the repeal of the statute. Bebel noted that in a society in which so called 'unnatural fornication' is prevalant among "all sections of society", enforcement would require the Prussian state to "build two new penitentiaries just to handle the number of violations against Paragraph 175 committed within the confines of Berlin alone" [2].

Sections of the Social Democratic reichstag representatives delegates "distanced themselves firmly" from Bebel, while a commitment to the rights of Homosexuals did not remain an approach articulated within the political programme of the SPD [3]

However Bernstein would not be an isolated figure in opposition to Paragraph 175, other prominent members of the German Social Democratic Party would oppose the statue and raise issues of relevance to the rights of persecuted sexual minorities. Within one of two articles published in Die Neue Zeit leading SDP theorist Eduard Bernstein elaborated a view upon the trial of Oscar Wilde, prosecuted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, within the United Kingdom. Bernstein including an acknowledgment that

within the German social-democratic movement, very far-reaching differences of opinion regarding the position society should adopt towards those sexual activities which do not fall within the ambit of what passes for normal [4]

In understanding how to characterise the 'crime' for which Wilde had been persecuted, Bernstein rejects judgements "based on more or less arbitrary moral concepts" instead noting the historic variability of what are considered 'unnatural acts' in reference to the historic prevalence of same-sex sex acts within Greek and Roman society.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175

[2] http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/pride20610.php

[3] Leftist Sexual Politics and Homosexuality: A Historical Overview

[4] http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1895/wilde/homosexual.htm

The National Union of Students (NUS) and the struggle for gay liberation

2008-03-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

In order to understand the prominence of commitments to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) rights within the organizational structures of the National Union of Students an understanding of the historical trajectory and emergence of such rights is necessary.

The formation of Gay Liberation movements during the 1970s reflected a rising level of 'radicalized' anger among marginalized of LGBT minorities, influenced most clearly by the 1969 Stonewall Riot in New York. The Stonewall Riot followed a 'raid' upon a gay drinking establishment in Greenwich Village, as punters turned their attention to the invading police force and met the routine harassment with resistance. The Stonewall Riots would influence the formation of 'Gay Liberation' movements within both America and the United Kingdom.

Despite the eventual dissipation of the Gay Liberation, under the pressure of conflicting internal differences, the organization would prove influential. Its legacy is expressed, albeit in a partial and conditional form, in the formation of a gay and lesbian 'movement' within NUS. As the NUS document 'Liberation officers in Every Union' notes, while there existed no "formal national campaign" in the early 1970s during the movements height, by 1971 the "first explicit policy on lesbian and gay liberation was passed by annual conference", while by the mid 1990s a specific LGB Campaign had been formed [1].

A degree of representation of minority groups has been ensured by utilising organisational structures for this purpose; regular LGBT conferences are meant to "democratically set the policy that gives the political direction to the campaign" alongside the election of LGBT officers [1].

While there rightly exists structures to ensure the representation of marginalized groups within the NUS, part of the proposed Governance Review of 2007/08 includes proposals that would attack 'Liberation' sections such as that of the LGBT Campaign.

Proposals include attempts to split the existing NUS national executive into a "board" and a "senate" in which the senate will include representatives of each liberation campaign, in contrast to the 'non-political' board that will meet a limited number of times a year and be comprised in part by external appointees. The board has been created to over-see "legal policies, the “strategic planning framework”, the wages of senior management, development of budgets and estimates, scrutiny of financial performance, scrutiny of senior management and appointments" [2]. It remains the case within the existing proposals no Liberation officer is ensured a place on a board that will possibly scrutinize their work.

Communists must be at the forefront of those defending the autonomy of the campaigns as the most consistent supporters of the rights of minority groups, however beyond simply seeking to defend the existing structures of NUS, questions must be raised about the reasons for dwindling LGBT conference sizes and the failure of many of the Liberation campaigns to resonate with students.

Priority campaigns are those said to be "based on the policy" decided upon at NUS LGBT conference meaning broadly that the LGBT committee, proposed of those elected at LGBT conference, "decide upon the priority areas for the year ahead" [3]

The existence of many of the campaigns remains unknown to most students, while the limited scope and visions they express reflect a growing apolitical trend within student politics. The mismanagement of these campaigns is assured by a situation in which so-called ‘independents’ have been able to secure election as LGBT officers. This is a process aided by the general lack of awareness of most students that annual LGBT conference is even taking place.

Accommodation by the left to the narrowness of the campaigns proposed is likely to result in the depoliticisation of many students, who have and will continue to turn away from the increasingly sectional, individualistic and apolitical politics pursued by the campaign.

The need to raise demands that speak to everyday existence of LGBT students remains clearly evident. As Lenin once noted Marxists must seek to "react to every manifestation of Tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects"[4] on the basis of an understanding that the project of Marxism is the project of human emancipation, possible only on the basis of collective liberation in which the opportunity for each individual's self-development is recognized and made a reality. This remains the only way that emancipation, irrespective of individual sexuality, may be won and sustained.

[1] A Liberation Campaign In Every Union

[2] http://www.free-education.org.uk/?p=393

[3] NUS LGBT Priority campaigns 2005-06

[4] Lenin, What is to be done?

Once More With Feeling: musings on the Soviet Union

2008-02-19T05:48:00.000-08:00

Ukrainian born Leon Trotsky assumed positions of prominence within both the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, holding high-ranking ministerial office within the newly formed Soviet government following the successive October revolution. During the early 1920s Trotsky led movements of opposition to the newly emerging Soviet bureaucracy, before his eventual expulsion in from the Communist Party and deportation from the Soviet Union in 1929.

It is during this subsequent period that Trotsky began to develop a theory of the Soviet Union’s development as conforming to that of a ‘degenerated workers state’. An understanding I will seek to expand upon in greater detail.

The starting point for a discussion of the nature of the soviet State remains the initial characterisation of the Soviet Union as that of the world’s first workers state emerging organically from the 1917 October revolution.

Within the early 1920s we begin to see the development of forms of 'bureaucratic deformation' within the USSR. The emergence of the young bureaucracy, originally subordinated to the wider agency of the working class, begins to grow independent from this constituency.

This growth of bureaucratic deformation remains bound with a series of historic catastrophes for the working class. The principle features of decisive importance included “the backwardness of the peasantry, the weariness of the proletariat and the lack of decisive support from the West” (1). The hasty retreat of the German Communist Party provides one glaring example of this. This retreat occurred during a period in which many Russians looked to Germany as the most likely basis for the international growth of revolution. This failure remains of decisive importance for the consolidation of power of the growing bureaucratic regime.

The characteristic features of the Bolshevik Party internal life during the initial years of the revolution may be broadly understood as belonging to the organizational method of democracy centralism; this enabled freedom of criticism and the intellectual struggle of competing ideas. As has been noted, “the history of Bolshevikism is the history of the struggle of factions” (2).

In the contexts of an escalating civil war, blockade and famine within the newly formed workers state, temporary measures of self-defense were taken to prohibit opposition parties.

A series of successive measures, “by means of a number of minor civil wars waged by the bureaucracy against the proletarian vanguard”, enable an understanding of the eventual dominance of a bureaucratic caste (1).

The prohibition of alternative parties and internal factions is transformed in understanding from a temporary evil necessitated by a hostile Civil War, to an elevated "principle" (3). The vibrant internal life of the Bolshevik Party, within which there existed a struggle of ideas, groups and factions, is replaced with the threat of internment in concentration camps, exile or death.

Power is transferred from the mass organizations upon which the successful revolution depended, as democratic centralism finds its distorted expression within the bureaucratic centralism of the ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’.

This usurpation of this power is enabled only because the “social content of this ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’ is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution” (1).

The ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’ is forced to defend the property relationships established by the proletarian revolution, for the purpose of maintaining its own interest; while at the same time representing the “worst domestic brake on progress, the greatest internal source of danger to the workers state, and an absolute obstacle to socialist revolutions outside the Soviet Union” (4).

The task that flowed from this is analysis was the need for a political movement to overthrow the bureaucracy for the purpose of the preservation of the existing property relations. Without the working class militating to crush the bureaucracy and open the way for socialism:

The bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into Capitalism (5)

Trotsky was entirely correct in this analysis, as substantiated by subsequent historical events, to the great misfortune of Russian workers who have witnessed a steep decline in life expectancy and the great many destructive uncertainties of capitalism. On the basis of the then still existent Soviet Union property relations, implying the curtailing of the rights of capital and the limited monopoly of foreign trade, adherents of global capital perceived the USSR as an irreconcilable enemy and welcomed this development. The subsequent restoration of capitalist property relations heralded a period within which the ideas of Marxism were said to be defeated.

Trotskyism ‘carried the torch’ during the dark years, highlighting the deformations that were elevated to ‘principles’ on the basis of the needs of the bureaucratic caste that had assumed power. It is upon the Marxist tradition, upheld by Trotsky, that we must seek to build to the appropriate lessons of the Soviet Union in our fight for new October revolutions.

1) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm

2) Trotsky, L. The Revolution Betrayed. Pg.91.

3) Trotsky. L. RB. Pg.240.

4) http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isr/vol21/no1/hansendeutscher.htm

5) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tia38.htm

Those nominations in full..

2008-02-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

The deadline has passed and now the prespective 'left' candidates have emerged. This is the list of prospective candidates, along with their particular grouping, to be ammended as and when necessary:

Education Not For Sale
President: Daniel Randall, Sheffield University
National Secretary: Heather Shaw, Sheffield College
National Treasurer: Koos Couvee, Sussex University
Vice-President Further Education: Laura Simmons
Block of 12: Heather Shaw, Sheffield College

PRESIDENT
Ruqayyah Collector (SBL)
Ciarán Norris (Indie)
Daniel Randell (ENS)
Wes Streeting (NOLS)

NATIONAL SECRETARY
Richard ‘Bubble’ Budden (Indie/"Bubbles")
Heather Shaw (ENS)

TREASURER
Koos Couvée (ENS)
Dave Lewis (Indie/"Bubbles")
Bryony Shanks (SBL)

VP HIGHER EDUCATION
Rob Owen (RESPECT)
Sam Rozati (Conservative)
Aaron Porter (OI)

VP WELFARE
Sarah Bolt
Hind Hassan (RESPECT)
Ama Uzowuru (OI)

VP FURTHER EDUCATION
Simon Byrne (RESPECT)
Laura Simmons (ENS)
Beth Walker (Indie/"Bubbles")

BLOCK OF TWELVE
Joel Braunold
Arran Cottam (SS)
Primal Andrew Fernando
Dan Glass (ENS)
Hind Hassan (RESPECT)
Becci Heard
Evangeline Holland- Ramsay (Independent FE)
Yemi Makinde
Ed Marsh
Florian Mertens
Stephen Mullen (Independent FE)
Susan Nash
Rob Owen (RESPECT)
Sam Rozati (Conservative)
Bryony Shanks (SBL)
Heather Shaw (ENS)
Elizabeth Somerville
Christopher Strafford (CS)
Tom Stubbs (LDYS of sorts)
Nasir Tarmann
Ben Whittaker
Hollie Williams (NOLS)

HONORARY VICE PRESIDENT
Anoosheh Azaadbar (Iranian student)
Rose Gentle

Alliance for Workers Liberty: lesser evils and collective class action

2008-01-18T04:06:00.000-08:00

Readers may or may not be aware that the Searchlight publication and associated organisations 'Hope Not Hate' and ‘Stop the BNP’ split from Unite Against Fascism in 2005. This has raised a series of questions about how the existing left interacts with the fractured anti-fascist movement. Alongside this debate emerges a series of issues of relevance to anti-fascist work.

Charlie Salmon of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL) treats us to his ruminations on the nature of Fascism in the article For A Working Class Campaign against Fascism in the latest edition of Solidarity.

Salmon characterizes Unite Against Fascism group as “a political coalition of the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Action” utilized when politically expedient for the purpose of “protests or conferences” (1). The extension of an invite to Sir Iqbal Sacranie as a headline speaker to UAF’s 2006 national conference, despite Sacranie’s well-documented reactionary and homophobic politics, is correctly noted as reflective of this opportunist political trend.

The article does fall short on a number of levels; the conclusions drawn remains deeply flawed. While the suggestion of a political alternative in the work of Searchlight, albeit one about which it remains mildly critical, is problematic to say the least.

The features of the UAF are contrasted to the “work towards major mobilisations of trade union members”, seemingly characteristic of the Searchlight organisation, alongside the latter's focus on “very successful, grass-roots responses” (2). The AWL limits the criticism of the Searchlight’s 'Stop the BNP' produced campaign material to an endorsement by millionaire Alan Sugar. An individual, who, readers will be amazed to find, apparently has "nothing to say about poorly funded public services and the attacks on the working class".

Searchlight suggested that the prime reason for their departure was because "it is incompatible for us to be in an organisation that is pushing a different strategy to our own" (1). A view seemingly collaborated by Salmon's article. That the reasons for the split amount to anything more than a desire to better pursue its particular brand of Labourism remain less than clear.

The role of anti-immigration as a characteristic feature of both Blair and Brown's premiership is a topic that receives scant attention in the pages of Searchlight. Any mentions of the Labour Party are confined to examples of the successful electoral 'fight-backs' of the kind Salmon touches upon as exemplary examples. The superficial analysis of the politics of Searchlight would seem to operate in contrast to suggestions made elsewhere within Solidarity that “eulogising Labour’s triumphs” with the use of a “single leaflet through the door a week before an election” simply won’t cut it (4).

This is perhaps reflective of the potentially divisive nature of the AWL’s call for a vote for Labour “in almost all the areas where the BNP is standing” in which no other ‘independent working class candidates’ are standing (5). An approach that while conducted under the ruberic of ‘collective working class action’ would seem to lend itself to ‘polemics’ of the kind Salmon provides.

While the article provides very little in the way of new information, it does provide something of a surprise with its use of the old, treating us to a good three paragraphs on Trotsky's views on the united-front tactic.

While providing quotes highlighting a series of entirely correct statements made by Trotsky on the nature of the united front, a correct integration of these views are far from evident by the AWL’s politics. Indeed this politics operates in direct contrast to the most perfunctory of understandings of this tactic. For Marxists, the question is not decided by a quotation, but by means of the correct method.

While Solidarity notes the need while utilising this tactic to “break ideologically and organisationally with the reformists and the centrists” (2) the extent to which this remains an abstraction far from concrete application remains evident within the pages of Solidarity.

(1) http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=146
(2) http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2008/01/13/working-class-campaign-against-fascism
(3) For a Workers United Front Against Fascism
(4) http://www.workersliberty.org/node/9691
(5) http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8256

Student Respect leader accused of racism

2007-12-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

Assed Baig of Staffordshire University and Student Respect has been attacked for a rather curious article written for a student rag ‘GK News’ in which he muses:

In reality it is the white ruling elite which are responsible for much of the problems that we see today. Nuclear weapons, AK47’s and M16’s are all invented and made by white people. Fighter Jets, tanks and land mines are a white invention and largely made in the white dominated Western World. Terrorism has been perpetrated by white states. The terrorism that we are told to fear in the so called ‘War on Terror’ was initially funded and terrorists trained by our governments.

These and other comments inspiring groups titled Racist GK Ramblings. Assed has since qualified his remarks within a mass facebook message. Assed argues in this message that he intended to describe the relationship of a ruling class to other subordinate classes and the role of “deep-rooted, sub-conscience racist” ideas that play a role within this. Assed does not probe the suggested relationship between racism as a “tool of the ruling class” and the suggested “deep seated racist ideas” hidden within us. That the “rulling class” may indeed be ‘multi-ethnic’ in character is not a theme to which Assed chooses to turn.

If Assed is guilty of anything it’s having a poor analysis of society, which he then articulates. Poorly. The mechanistic appraisal of class and race he provides only mirrors the pond-like depth of the cod-sociology-cum-political analysis he is able to provide. That the wider political-project of Student Respect cultivates ‘student leaders’ able to provide ‘polemics’ of this depth perhaps speaks volumes of the shallowness of the project.

Britz

2007-11-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

Britz hit our screens a few nights ago promising something exciting and a bit glitzy with a comprehensive ad-campaign in the run up to its four hour screening, including an accompanying DVD release.

The reaction to the show seems to have been mixed with the ever-progressive Telegraph suggest it expressed the show was largely expressive of an inherently simplistic “old-fashioned agitprop politics". This comment can only be understood in reference to the hamfistedly deadpan script and acting provided for the duration of the second instalment, unable to provide a degree of nuance beyond that perhaps expected in a book entitled ‘The Dummies Guide to Why I Became A Terrorist’.

What’s interesting is that while the program addressed many of the suggested featured involved in the ‘radicalisation’ of young British Muslims (including the screening of films displaying atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere for example) the characterisation didn’t convincingly display a person being radicalised. Even with the use of running-commentary – roughly paraphrased as “oh, god, this is terrible, maybe that terrorist sympathising bloke had the right idea” - provided by the protagonist for the sake of the viewer. That said, the cardboard-cut-out approach to characterisation involved in the second episode occasionally provided a few laughs; when a comrade sees the main protagonist semi-naked and objects she dejectedly comments, with all the frustrated nuance of a teenager being asked to tidy her room, “what does it matter, I’ll be dead in an hour!” While this was perhaps intended to be something akin to the criminal in Albert Camus’s The Outsider rejecting his last rites, it instead comes across as more of a blunt instrument labelled ‘pathos’ smacked around the viewer’s head.

Text provided at the end of the episode cited statistics noting the number of those opposed to the war in Iraq and the resulting fear of persecution within Muslim communities. These figures may lend themselves to associations between a rise in terrorist activity and the increasing frustration felt by many Muslims about British imperial adventures within Muslim dominated countries. These are points that have readily been made by Stop the War Coalition leaders such as John Rees in reference to the perceived absence of ‘civil liberties’. While this is likely to retain strong elements of truth – an approach which limits the causes of terrorism to this factor alone seems unable to raise wider commentary on the nature of political-Islam, ignoring this phenomena for the sake of a good/bad duality of limited scope and vision.

As Mike Mcnair notes in the Weekly Worker, the focus of the U.K. as a target for the actions of Jihad is not a new phenomena while the rise of Jihadism must be understood in reference to the rise of political Islam, operating in a vacuum in which Communism has not the hegemonic appeal as the alternative to the alienation and commodification of capitalism. This fact operates within a context in which advocates of Marxism seem gripped by inertia and a dramatic absence of confidence in their own ideas. As Mcnair suggests the left, in this sense, has provided no solutions to the frustrations of members of those aforementioned working-class communities within the U.K. While Yassmine Mather and Ardeshir Mehrdad have commented that in order to understand the role of political Islam we must first understand the nature of the “economic, political and ideological” crisis enveloping those states in which Radical Islam has been resurgent, the role of a form of Neo-Liberalism seems key to this process.

Stop the War coalition censorship of critics

2007-10-14T10:01:00.001-07:00

Both Hands Off the People Of Iran and Communist Students have had their affiliation revoked by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) leadership – because of their opposition to both an imperialist attack on Iran and the theocratic regime in Teheran. This policy has been characterized by StWC chair, Andrew Murray, as "entirely hostile to the Coalition". A comment that speaks greatly of the approach currently supported by the Coalition on the issue of Iran.

In the face of criticisms made by both Communist Students and Hands Off the People of Iran the leadership of the coalition has resorted to ham-fisted exclusion. This should be condemned by any principled internationalists - quite regardless of whether they support the campaign aims of either organisation.

The full press-release can be read on the HOPOI site.

I'd ask that you all take a few seconds out of your day to email the STWC leadership to complain about this blatant censoring of critical voices. You may do so here

The History of Capitalism

2007-10-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

Both within the later-parts of the first volume of Capital and in other writings such as Grundrisse Karl Marx provides an overview of the origins and development of capitalist economy seemingly at odds with that most commonly ascribed to Marxist political philosophy.

Far from the common sense conception of Marxism expressing the simple reduction of "legal and political" structure of society to the "base" relations of production in a fairly mechanistic and automated fashion, these writings suggest a depth of historical understanding not easily evident by the accusations often leveled at Marx by his detractors.

While I’m not sure that Marx devoted huge tracts of writing on the precise nature of the developmental stages of abstract capitalism, those sections in which Marx does mention these processes are very illuminating. Marx notes in Grundrisse for example the ‘contradictory form’ of bourgeoisie society containing as it does relations “derived from earlier forms … in an entirely stunted form” [1].

Within the chapters ‘The origins of the Capitalist Farmer’ and the ‘Modern Theory of Colonalisation’ Marx appears to provide a proto-psychological basis for the advent of capitalist accumulation, noting that:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class that by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws [2]

Marx talks of slavery as providing the embryonic basis of primitive accumulation before noting the exponential growth in ships employed in this trade, suggesting that (within America) the cotton industry provided the basis for “commercial exploitation”. Fermenting the “eternal natural laws” of capitalist accumulation [2]. The use of this term may well be an ironic dig at those that presume – as many continue to do so – that the laws of capital are unchangingly rigid expressions of eternal economic phenomena, upon which we may perhaps affix phrases such as that of “human nature”. Marx makes short thrift of such ideas by smashing the notion that features characteristic of capitalist economic relations, such as that of money, “wade through all economic relations” [1]. Noting the midwife of force inherent in tumultuous societal change, Capital nears its end with a closing remark on the blood and dirt the history of capital comes “dripping with from head to toe” [3].

[1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
[2] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
[3] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm#n15

Stalinism and the 'Democratic People's Republic of North Korea’

2007-09-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

A fascinatingly macabre insight into both the workings of a stanoloid state-machine and what remains of those grouping that unquestioningly follow them has been provided courtesy of a curious grouping calling itself the All Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (ALCPB). The grouping seems to exist without many of the links binding the U.K. Stalinist left to the official communism of the now non-existent Communist Party of Great Britain, suggesting a U.K. membership limited beyond even that of the remnants of the existing Stalinist left.

The AUCPB has posted within their internet group forum an official North Korean press-release titled Spirit of Defending Leader with Very Life Displayed in Flood-hit Areas. The article notes and comments upon the effects of the recent flooding affecting the ‘Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea’ (DPRNK) by remarking on the lengths workers have supposed to have gone to in order to protect images glorifying the country's leader, President Kim Il Sung. The article comments rather amazingly:

among such people are peasant of the Jongdong Co-op Farm in Phyonggang County Cha Hyang Mi who handed over portraits (of President Kim Il Sung) to rescuers and went to the bottom of the torrent water, peasant of the same farm Pak Jong Ryol who lost his wife and child by landslide but saved the portraits and worker of the Ichon Foodstuff Factory Kang Hyong Gwon who firmly took portraits in his hands in flood though his five-year-old daughter slipped down from his back (2)

(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union
(2)http://www.tongilkorea.net/?action=fullnews&id=8276

Lindsey German and the Grand Old Duke of York

2007-09-11T23:30:00.000-07:00

A "Student Organising Meeting" was called at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) on Saturday 8 September, with speakers including NUS President Gemma Tumelty, Lindsey German and Tony Benn of the Stop the War Committee (STWC).

Writing in the pages of Socialist Worker, Assed Baig prefaced a report of the meeting by noting, apparently without irony, "things have changed" [1]. Beyond wafer-thin displays of public-unity between Gemma Tumelty and the Stop the War leadership, the meeting reaffirmed the central importance the STWC intends to assign the “Grand old Duke of York” approach to demonstrations in the coming year.

Lindsey German provided a perfunctory speech on the "global" successes of the anti-war movement. Highlighting the "lobby of parliament" on 8 October, she paused only briefly to brush aside suggestions that student activists might question the strategy of a march, distinguishable from the last only by its dwindling number of attendees.

Perhaps fearing that promises of unceasing protest may have sounded more menacing than originally intended, the crowd were treated to a seemingly endless shopping-list of Stop the War achievements, ranging from the premature ejection of Blair from office to the “recent decision to withdraw British troops from Basra to a base outside the city” [1].
That the leadership of the STWC felt compelled to rally the troops to hear about these latest achievements suggests that they at least partially recognise the demoralising effect of asking a fairly small core of activists to repeat unchanging slogans, in lieu of a wider strategy for change.

Ben Lewis of Communist Students commented on the “global” anti-war movement Lindsey German had made not inconsiderable reference to, by highlighting the existence of an anti imperialist anti-war movement in Iran and the ripe opportunity this presents for principled unity among Iranian workers, women and students in opposition to Iran’s Islamic regime, while opposing US imperialism.

This position of solidarity was in turn caricatured by an SWP member from the floor, with the expressed support of the STWC leadership on the platform, as dictating to the Iranian left. Unsurprising though this may be, such an attempt to deflect criticism with convenient hyperbole should be met with the disapproval it deserves.

[1] http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=12990

Gay Rights in Iran & The SWP

2007-08-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

The issue of rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans individuals (LGBT) has reached unparalleled prevalence on the far-left within the last 20 years or so, related discussion feature in the Socialist Workers Party’s ‘Marxism’ and the Socialist Party’s ‘Socialism’ events yearly. Accusations of retrospective homophobia levelled at Socialist Party comrades are dismissed as nonsense, or simply attributed to the lingering ideological baggage of previous political leaders. Such as Socialist Appeal’s Ted Grant – a man prone to describing the movement for gay liberation as “petty bourgeois” nonsense [1].

That the language used by sections of the left in reference to these issues has changed is not expressive of a reawakening of the left to the importance of these issues. Far from the championing the rights of oppressed and minorities groups within the last five years there has instead been an abdication of basic solidarity within many of the most oppressed and marginalized within these groupings.

Comments made by Lindsey German of the Respect Party most clearly express the Herculean task sections of the far-left have set themselves in accommodating phantom right-wing reaction of every shade and hue. This is perhaps most famously expressed by the characterization of the rights of gays and women as expendable in an attempt to avoid “shibboleths” at the Marxism 2003 meeting ‘Revolutionaries & the left’ [2].

That Respect has had to begrudgingly accommodate – if just formally – an acknowledgement of the rights of LGBT individuals within the material it publishes says something about the measure of pressure exerted on the leadership in the face of previous omissions and oversights [3].

I cite these examples not for the joy of the inarticulate genuflection within which they are couched but to instead suggest it is expressive of the wider politics of the Socialist Workers Party’s role inside and outside of Respect. Beyond the lip-service occasionally paid to the issue at conference time and in policy documents scant attention is provided by the Socialist Workers Party to the rights of oppressed minorities they begrudgingly champion, as is most clearly the case in Iran.

Reading the pages of the ‘Socialist Worker’ one would not know that there even existed a persecuted LGBT movement in Iran, a belief that would seem to oddly coincide with views attributed to London Central Mosque cleric Sheikh Sharkhawy, that homosexuality simply does not exist in the Islamic Republic of Iran [4].

Until recently the most obvious omission of this fact related to the scant coverage of the hanging of two gay teenagers – an act rightly condemned by gay rights organizations such as Outrage! The threatened deportation from the UK of Iranian lesbian Pegah Emambakhsh to near certain “arrest, imprisonment, torture, lashings and/or possible execution” looks set to continue this tradition of silence on the part of the Socialist Workers Party – members of which can expect very few articles about the persecution of Pegah and others like her [5].

The attacks on gay minorities in this and other instances are attacks on us all and should rightly be met with the vocal and continuous outrage they deserve. The task of principled communists is to call on the unity of LGBT minorities, students and workers to condemn these acts and fight against the capitalist fundamentalists that threaten and divide them, as part of a wider project of principled international solidarity in opposition to imperialist war and regime change from above.

[1] http://www.marxist.com/the-theoretical-origins-of-the-degeneration-of-the-fourth-interview-with-ted-g-3.htm

[2] http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/602/respect%20LGBT.htm

[3] http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2005nov/2202.htm

[4] http://www.ilga.info/Information/Legal_survey/europe/supporting%20files/out_and_muslim_in_the_united_kin.htm

[5] http://www.petertatchell.net/international/savepegah.htm

Marx, Negri & Callinicos

2007-08-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

Hardt and Negri's 'Multitude' - a Foucaultian appraisal of the phenomena of globalisation in reference to the emergence of a diverse 'multitude' contains an interesting comment on the nature of Marxist Labour Theory of Value, namely that:

"Marx adopts from the classical philosophers the Maxim that in Capitalist society the source of all value and wealth is labour" [1: pg 144]

Interestingly the point that Marx indeed "adopted" a labour theory of value - namely, rejected the implication that labour itself is the sole source of wealth is hardly touched upon by Negri - who instead choosing to build upon a conflated misconception of Marxist theory to make wider points on the nature of Abstract labour.

The point I raise here is of interest to the debates surrounding the opening line of the 'What We Stand For' column of the Socialist Workers Party's 'Socialist Worker, namely the statement that under capitalism "The Workers create all the wealth" [2].

While we may find it less strange to attribute statements of this kind to a theorist standing in the tradition Negri does - shunning Capital as a flawed work that:

Served to reduce critique to economic theory, to annihilate subjectivity in objectivity, to subject the subversive capacity of the proletariat to the reorganising and repressive intelligence of capitalist power' [3].

It may be considered a rather more curious statement for an avowedly Neo-Marxist organisation to make. Amusingly it is SWP theoretical big-wig Alex Callinicos that takes Negri to task most comprehensively for his contradictory 'reading' of Marx [3]. Callinicos notes that the primacy assumed by labour "as subjectivity, as source, as potential of all wealth" contradicts with Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program' namely the statement that:

Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power

Jack Conrad of the CPGB has correctly analysed the Socialist Worker's 'What We Stand For' column in 'One-dimensional Marxism and proposition one' [2] and drawn wider conclusions about the Economistic divergence from Marxism it - in part - expresses. That Callinicos has made criticisms of this particular 'misreading' of Marx (albeit via the work of Negri) as "symptomatic of a deeper conceptual shift" is telling.

[1] Multitude - Negri / Hardt
[2] http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/605/nature.htm
[3] http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj92/callinicos.htm

Old Marx Vs Yound Marx

2007-06-24T14:00:00.000-07:00

First an apology, I have been delayed from contributing to this blog due to a number of largely work-related factors, as Engels poignently remarked at Marx's funeral oration: "man must, before all else, eat, drink, live and clothe himself, and then only can he engage in politics, science, art, religion, etc!" [1]

My first exposure to Marx as a teenager was via the 'Philosophical and Economic manuscripts' - and to some extent - these paved the way for the development of much of my thought on topics surrounding Marx and Marxism and my understanding of it. These are essencially the early writings of Marx (identified by some as spanning the period up until the publication of the German Ideology). The great deal of theory on early and late Marx seems to have grown exponentially with time. It may perhaps be said that this point relates to the relatively more recent publication of a lot of Marx's earlier writings.

Comments that have been made with regards to the early 'humanistic' Marx - attributable here to Easton in his 'Alienation and the Early Marx' - are an important reference point for how we understand the development of Marxist thought. Reading Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" it becomes clearly apparent the entirely unproblematic reading of 'Socialism' or indeed 'Marxism' that have been utilised by opponents (as though such a homogenous entity ever existed).

There are - unsurprisingly - discernable differences within the work of 'early and late' Marx, the suggestion found within the 'Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts' that Man himself becomes a commodity is quite a contrast to a later Marxist conception of man's exploitation on the basis of the nature of his ability to sell his labour a valorisation of capital (i.e the production of surplus value in conflict with the interests of the owners of the means of production). While, in other sections of the Manuscripts Marx describes briefly the "palaces" capitalism produces, alongside the worker's "hovels" - hinting at the later work of Engels's 'Condition of the Working Class in England'. The concepts of alienation, an inherent 'human nature' (or species-being) and the commodification of this human nature are some of the key characteristic features of the work.

The point Easton makes - that we may distinguish two distinct Marxs) relates to an understanding of a later deterministic Marx (as expressed by Capital and Theories of Surplus Labour) betraying the early humanistic Marx. It is noted, for example, that the topic of alienation is not something to which Marx does not returns in detail in later works [2]. While it may be said that we find within works such as 'Theories of Surplus Value' a scope for later deterministicly inevitable relationship to capitalist crisis - with millennial overtones of future joy, serenity, prosperity, and justice - in which development seems intrinstictly caotic and prone to dramatic crisis.

I remember once being asked quite good-naturedly by a fellow student which was the 'right' Marx - the early or the late: I gave a fairly perfunctory reply and then went away and had a good think. While The Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 were I believe published posthumously, it seems clear that we should not view any of the formative writings of the period as 'fixed' in stone, expressing rigidly unchanging thought. At the risk of providing a cop-out, In much the same way that Marx adapted to the changing political situation within which he was writing, and responded to this fact - so should we, illustrating the dialogical and dialectical nature of any application of this thought.

[1]http://www.marxists.org/archive/kun-bela/pamphlets/1932/12.htm
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

Time for a new workers’ party?

2007-05-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Article

There is an interesting new article titled Time for a New Workers' Party? by our friends in Permanent Revolution, which has just been posted on their website. Most of the article is spent debunking the political projects of the Socialist Party, Respect and company. Depressingly little of substance is provided by way of an alternative to these projects.

Within the article PR outline the need to "pursue the vital task of patiently building a revolutionary socialist party". How? We're told: "by direct action, by uniting rank and file militants and activists, by building from the base, by ensuring democratic control of our organisations". What do these things actually mean - if not just the internal party-building of another left-wing sect? I rather suspect you'd be hard pressed to find many leftists who wanted a disunited and undemocratic union-movement. Fairly unsubstantial stuff. We are told that the "numbers of working class militants that can be won to revolution and a communist organisation is small at the moment" perhaps reviving the not unusual argument that during this period the revolutionary party (presumably this is Permanent Revolution?) has to ready itself and build with gradual growth for periods of greater struggle.

Comments

Depressingly, when asked about the Campaign for a Marxist Party, a supporter referring to PR as 'we' replies "who are they?". While commenting on the Mcdonnell campaign, the curious remark is made that it is "largely SP dominated". This the Socialist Party that disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1991? Perhaps Socialist Action is the group they had in mind. The general feeling I was left with was that Permanent Revolution doesn't know what the Permanent Revolution thinks:

I'm not sure either that the impetus for a new mass party will come out of the Labour Party.... yes such a struggle would have to intersect with any mass bourgeois workers' party and split it. That's one possible scenario- but you can't second guess the class struggle surely?

I should point out that this is a 'comment' and may not actually reflect the opinions of PR. Though If this is reflective of the views of a membership showing the advanced sections of the working class the forward, I could make a general guess about prospects for class struggle! Another member replies, also largely suggesting a turn away from the Labour Party:

"not least because the Labour Party is a profoundly unfriendly place for those us trying to build communism...from my experience anyway members of the LP are so far from sympathetic to communism there's really little point in being a member."

Hardly a new phenomena, this hasn't dissuaded Communists from involvement in the Labour Party prior to now. The suggestion that Communists would make the decisions on which organisations they involve themselves in on the basis of popularity seems a tad ahistorical to say the least. Though, as i've pointed out previously, this may not actually reflect the opinions of the Permanent Revolution grouping.

Mob beat cross-dresser in Jamaica

2007-05-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to draw attention to an article on the Jamaica Observer website:

Mob beats cross-dresser in Jamaica

A cross-dreser was set upon and severely beaten by a mob in Falmouth's Water Square yesterday morning.
The news of the man's presence in the community spread rapidly and in a matter of minutes scores of angry residents converged on the scene and began to rain blows all over the cross-dresser's body with sticks, stones and whatever weapon they could find...

Full article here

The only LGBT rights organization in Jamaica is the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays - J-FLAG. As a recent TUC article highlights, J-Flag are opperating in a dire political and economic context, with "appalling financial difficulties" faced by the organisation. Any donation you can spare would i'm sure be warmly welcomed by the organisation.

International Socialist Group & The Green Party's "left turn"

2007-05-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

Following the reports in the Weekly Worker of a 'split' in the ISG between those who advocate and oppose work in Respect - the latest edition of the International Socialist Group journal ('Socialist Outlook') has a piece on Derek Wall which notes the "endorsement" by the ISG of Kovel and Lowy's "Ecosocialist Manifesto" - suggesting strengthened ties between the "Eco-Socialist" Green Left platform in the Green Party and the ISG. Is there a story here? Or are our friends in the ISG just expressing some basic left solidarity while improving their green credentials?

The suggested "left turn" of the Green Party - following the election of Green Left bigwig Derek Wall as co-leading speaker of the Green Party - raises some points of interests for the far left. In an article cited by Humantide (which seems to have vanished from the SP website) the Socialist Party outlines its position on this issue. The SP rightly point out that principled leftists should reject the negative effects of punitive taxation on the poorest sections of society (perhaps an obvious point, but one that should be made anyway) while largely failing to address the most basic of points - that a coherent understanding of the role of class, and a substantial working class base of support, is largely absent from the party. This is a point made by the AWL in "Green Party turns left?".

The implications of this are expressed well by the suggested Green Party "betrayals" documented within the Socialist Party article, as it is tossed hither and tither between competing internal factions. The Socialist Party ends by "welcoming" the development, but largely writing off the progressive role the organisation can play - expressed for the SP in relation to the Campaign for a New Workers Party.

Friends of North Korea

2007-05-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

The most recent article to grace the blog of "New Worker Features" by General Secretary of the New Communist Party Andy Brooks concerns the "hero" Kim Il Sung and the general defence of the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea. Which provides a perfect opportunity to outline a relatively new organisation on the scene; the Friends of North Korea.

Founded around December 2005 the Friends of North Korea appears to have been brought to life by a collection of tankie and tankie sympathizers for the purposes of cosying up to North Korea. The most recent activity of the grouping has been noted by the Staliniod Revolutionary Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in an online report:

On April 14, 2007, a public meeting and social was held under the title "Korea Defends Independence". It was organised by Friends of Korea....

From the same folks at the RCPB (M-L) we find that the "Co-ordinating Committee of Friends of Korea" has written a letter to Comrade Kim Jong Il signed 'Michael Chant, General Secretary', expressing the prerequisite groveling on the "occasions of the 61st anniversary of the foundation of the Workers’ Party of Korea".

A heavy role for Harpal Brar (no surprises there really) is hinted at in reports of meetings by the New Communist Party here. While earlier accounts of a "preparatory committee" for Friends of Korea cite members of groups as wide-ranging as the NCP, RCPB (ML), CPGB (ML) and SLP - a veritable whos who of the Stalinist far left!

If anyone has anything else which would shed light on the organisation - they don't seem to have a website, your input would be very much appreciated.

Boris Yeltsin: Far-left Reaction

2007-05-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

Spartacist League / CWI exchange

I realise by now the corpse of Boris will be quite, quite cold - but in the world of far-leftist politics a week is a slightly longer time.

I've been awaiting the Yeltsin obits for some time now - the left is at its best when it knows who it hates, and it hates them passionately. I also enjoy it when various leftist publications sweep aside the vestiges of bourgeois-morality (respect for the dead) for the sake of a good, fiery polemic.

It's long been a common refrain of the Sparts in the international communist league's that members of the Socialist Party's CWI were during the early 90's "on Yeltin's barricade". It's a widely acknowledged fact that if you are to observe an exchange between members of each organisation - a mention is guaranteed within the first sixty seconds, regardless of the previous conservation or wider political context within which said conversation is enacted.
The Spartacist League quote, rather amusingly, a "front page" CWI account during the period, from the "Barricades in Moscow":

"I am a participant in the struggle for democracy...I went to the White House and helped build barricades around the monument." (1991)

Interestingly in a piece released by Militant titled 'Militant's Real History' the following contrasting quote is provided:

"We publicly distanced ourselves from the pro-capitalist Yeltsinites,... flooding towards the defence of their hero at the White House in Moscow"

I suspect this inconsistency will be largely attributed to the malignant role of the Grant / Woods grouping, as suggested above.

However we view the CWI position on "Yeltsins barricades" retrospectively, the party make it slightly clearer how they feel about him with the benefit of hindsight, in a April 26th article titled "Wild capitalism across the former USSR". In which the "bitter experience of the mass of the population under his rule" is duly noted. Ignoring the historic inconsistencies - it is a fairly perfunctory obituary with the usual stodgy prose we've all come to expect from 'The Socialist'.

I await the Spartacist League rebuttal with a certain amount of unhealthy glee.

Yeltsin: Drunken Buffon

Moving on, the New Communist Party tell us it was the "drunken buffoon" Yeltsin who put the "final nails into the coffin of the Soviet Union". That's more like it, comrades! It doesn't exempt others from blame of course, citing "traitor" Gorbachov as a precursor. After this some curiously random points are made (try finding the point in there if you can) about British history before ending on a high-note, the defense of the workers' states in "China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam...Cuba". So many workers state, so little time in which to defend them.

There hasn't been much else on the Staliniod-left that i've actually seen, hopefully Lalkar or the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) will provide us with something yet.

Class War - Bash the Rich October 28th

2007-04-26T18:11:00.000-07:00

You read correctly reader. No, this isn't an 80's timewarp machine with added broadband. Class war is advertising in the latest edition of the paper (Summer 2007) a Bash the Rich march - the last one being as far as I know in 1985:

TOFFS OUT: BASH THE RICH: MARCH ON CAMERON’S HOUSE IN NOTTING HILL ON SATURDAY OCTOBER 28…

DETOURING TO THE SWANKY HOMES OF THE REST OF THE NOTTING HILL SET – George Osborne/Tom parker Bowles/

OLD ETONIANS FUCK OFF! CLASS WAR… NAKED… UNAPOLOGETIC… AND BACK ON THE FUCKING AGENDA!! (Bullingdon Club attire optional)

Ex-Class War founder Ian Bone is also blogging about this. What's going on there? Do I detect a frisson of reconciliation? Perhaps just comradery unity. From what little I understand there was a break with Leeds Class War and London Class war, after the Leeds members refused to be involved beyond issue 73 for various reasons. Wikipedia suggests one of which was a conflict surrounding the "Stuntism" of Bash the Rich type actions favoured by I.Bone. My learned class-war friends can fill in the gaps if they want to. I should probably by his book about Class War, but times are hard.

Anyone fancy a bit of knees-up hows your father i'm-a-real-cockerney class war action? It might not be the best idea to inform the coppers that you're planning to surround Cameron's house five months in advance, given that the 1985 'bash the rich' march was prevented by a "heavy police presence". A point that has been commented upon elsewhere;

Publicising a Bash the Rich march in advance is like informing the law beforehand of your intention to hold up a bank

We will indeed see.

Leftist jokes

2007-04-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

In a somewhat desperate bid to avoid doing any work at all i've been collecting some injokes about the far-left. One of my favourites is a variation of a joke which starts "I was walking across a bridge one day" and is most commonly used in reference to religion but with a little tweaking it's much funnier. If you have a joke about the left, leftist organisations or something relative to this - please feel free to share. I would source these, but i've no idea where they're from.

An old revolutionary walks across the Brooklyn Bridge one day, and he sees man of a similar age standing on the edge, about to jump. He runs over and says: "Stop. Don't do it."

"Why shouldn't I?" he asked.

"Well, there's so much to live for!"

"I'm just depressed, I've been a Communist all my life and the revolution seems as far away as ever"

"You're a Communist?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I am as well!! Did you originally join the Communist Party USA?"

"Yeah"

"Me too! Did you join the pro-Trotsky Communist League of America in 1928, which later merged with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of America in 1934?"

"Yeah"

"Spooky, Me too! After the WPA was expelled from the Socialist Party of America in 1936 did you then go on to join the Socialist Workers Party USA and the fourth international?"

"I did actually…"

"Me too! In the 1940 dispute did you side with Cannon or Shachtman?"

"Cannon."

"Me too! In 1962 did you join Robertson's opposition caucus, the Revolutionary Tendency?"

"Yep."

" Holly shit! And of course like me you were expelled and went on to join the International Communist League (Spartacist)"

"Well that goes without saying!"

"In 1985 did you join the International Bolshevik Tendency who claimed that the Sparts have degenerated into an "obedience cult""

"No way!"

"Nah, me neither. In 1998 did you join the Internationalist Group after the Permanent Revolution Faction were expelled from the ICL?"

"Yeah! I can't believe this! Maybe I won't…."

"Die counterrevolutionary scum!". And he pushes him off the edge

And one more:

Two greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other, "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?!?"

see-also: Political Lightbulb Jokes (Dave's Part)

Socialist Party: bridge to revolution

2007-04-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Any claims the Socialist Party may once have had to the high-holy grounds of ortho-trotskyism, on the basis of an enduring critique of state-capitalism, seem to be fading fast. Though this ground has been conceded by the membership for some time now.

In discussions with members of any party, tendency or organisation i'm always careful to try and approach the topics members will expect to be raised creatively - such topics tend to be treated fairly dismissively, if just through repetition.

The topic I raise now is an example of one of those.

Criticism of the the programme upon which the Socialist Party party stand during election periods - and that most commonly expressed in material - fails to appreciate the 'period' within which we function, and the subtle nuances of the Transitional approach applied. Indeed, such approaches misunderstand the very nature of the transitional approach. Hopefully I won't provide a caricacture of the SP's position if I suggest that this is a fairly common reply to the suggestion that the SP does not link the demands it makes to the need for wider structural change.

I will make a point here that may not be unfamiliar, though its importance isn't lessened by repetition. The failure to concretely link demands made to the need for a revolutionary overthrow of society is a criminal abduction of duty for any principled Marxist. Accusations may be made that I quibble over phrasing (I apologise for trying to pre-empt those who may respond to this) however the 'phrasing' is key.

Housey notes a common phrase utilised for 'linking' demands to a wider programme of change: 'We fight for a socialist world....democratic public ownership of the big companies that currently dominate the world'. The linking of public ownership to democracy is a novelty on the basis of the election material I've seen in the South East, but putting this aside for one moment, If we want to move beyond demands for a programme of 'socialist' nationalisation of industry and instead challenge the entire basis of capitalist rule, how might we do this? Not to be dull or worthy, let me cite the following quote;

"A society without social contradictions will naturally be a society without lies and violence. However there is no way of building a bridge to that society save my revolutionary, that is, violent means. The revolution itself is a product of class society and of necessity bears its traits"
Trotsky: Their Morals & Ours

Unless the Socialist Party comrades are aware, our society is still one of social contradiction requiring revolutionary, that is violent, overthrow. Any attempt to intuit this from much of the material I cite (and most of the leaflets distributed by the party during elections) would be hard, if not impossible [1].

We can compare this to the CNWP. What is being argued for in the CNWP is a left-reformist show that is hard to differential from the McDonnell campaign. Ironically most Socialist Party members would actually not disagree that the SP's involvement in the CNWP is an abdication of a basic transitional approach largely because the Trotskyists within this organisation are told they themselves can't link these demands to the wider need for socialism. Members have my sympathy, it's a poor diet of gruel for any principled Marxist to try and consist on.

[1] As an aside, a leading SP youth cadre made a point not too long ago on the Revolution boards [http://www.revolutiononboard.org.uk] that a revolutionary, that is violent, overthrow of capitalist society might be required for this purpose - might.

Tory MP worried by polygamous gay immigrants

2007-04-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

Conservative MP Mr Davies has warned that human rights laws and equality regulations could open the door for gays to demand similar recognition for multiple partnerships, with groups of men or women presenting themselves as polygamous 'families' according to the Mail.

The old fear of the promiscuous gay male has reared its head again, this time articulate by this particular backbench Conservative MP. The point is entirely baseless because, as noted within the article by Stonewall: "In all countries that have legalised gay marriage or any other form of same-sex recognition, polygamy is illegal" - so essentially this is a bit of a non-news story with little actual legislative relevance. What is interesting however is the language used to convey the fear of such an occurrence ever happening.

The way Davis phrases his points may be familiar to many: the fear of accepting a "pretended family relationship" (Sychin) as normal in law. What this story tells us in part is that good homosexuality requires bad homosexuality, Davis utilises the imaginary scurge of the polygamous gay immigrant to illustrate this point. Many of the arguments that have been made criticising same-sex civil partnerships also recognise this fact, suggesting such pairings effectively render those partnerships (such as polygamous pairings) that are not recognised by law - 'queer'. Many of the debates surrounding Section 28 involved an implicit acceptance that by articulating or codifying the gay male and female in law they may be subject to greater scrutiny ("By amending the law, we will make them part of a civil and civilized society" as one Labour MP once up it - Stychin 2003).

The progression towards acceptable forms of partnership and activism has been elsewhere acknowledged and commented upon (Warner 2000). It's not hard to find example within a UK/US political context; Stonewall, started as a riot, and is now a fairly servile state-depentent pressure-group participating in Pride events with corporate-backing that would rival the Olympics. Stonewall speak out, if only to assuage the fears of the 'confused' Member of Parliment.

Stychin: Governing Sexuality, 2003
Warner: The problem with normal, 2000

Hyper-activism & Theory

2007-04-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

The Socialist Unity Blog notes in reference to a piece by Gregor Gall the propensity of the far-left to wax lyrical about the the endless potential of the "coming period";

"Every new period is more favourable and exciting than the last. The size and strength of the opportunities, especially for party building, are exaggerated to motivate members and supporters."

It's in this context that I read one of the latest Respect communiques titled "Respect anticipates nationwide progress in local elections". The general gist is best summarized by the following paragraph;

"No other party in the history of British politics has made such huge advances in such little time. The Respect Party is set to make yet more gains in this year's local elections...one wonders what difference Brown will make. There is little wonder what difference Respect makes." Respect Unity Coalition

My first thought was one of sympathy for those cadres who may take this at face-value without the prerequisite truckload of salt required. I'm sure many ex-swp activists will have been in similar situations, told about the "great gains to be expected just round the corner", how to "build for the next demo", to make sure it's "bigger than the last" in what can easily seem like an endless secession of some what aimless hyper activism. The conclusion Gall draws from this fact is partially true, this kind of activism does fail to learn the lessons in its rush to capitalise on the shifting moods of whichever movement it's currently seaking to capitalise on, but it relates to a wider misconception about the role of theory. Without a necessary understanding of the reasons we involve ourselves in the rigors of activism - through a concrete appreciation of the theoretical grounding that relates to every political action we undertake - activism becomes unsustainable and we lose sight of our long-term aims. Relative to this is a fundemental severing of practice from theory, the reasons principled Leninists involve themselves in organisations like STWC gets lost in the endless drive to "build the movement".

Jarvis Cocker in Mayday Shocker!!

2007-04-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

Mayday fasts approaches, it seems to have become a bit of a damp-squid with few bothering to make the journey up to London for the (fairly dull) event. However, an organisation calling itself 'Space Hijackers' who seem to have ties to the Wombles have released a mysterious communique with ideas to jazz up Mayday, so far they include;

A) Mayday Dress up Shocker

The suggestion is that we dress up like business men on Mayday to infiltrate "the heart of the Corporate Financial Centres of London" - oh dear, seems fairly obvious where that's going to be. Why dress up I hear you cry? Because "It's time to pull your finger out and realise that your individuality isn't challenged with a bit of dressing up." Who'd have thought.

B) Mysterious Celeb Appearance (And we don't mean Redgrave)

The Space Hijackers tell us that we (or they) will be treated to a singalonga with Jarvis Cocker himself, because 'Cunts are still running the world' as his latest single declares. If you aren't cringing at the thought of the SH-bloc getting chummy with a celeb with more money than sense right now, chances are you will be by Mayday.

see: the article for details or visit the Space Hijacker website

The tossing Green Party

2007-04-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

There's an article on the Guardian's commentisfree website from Jenny Jones of the Green Party Jenny, writing about the approaching Live Earth concerts, suggests the "temporarily suspension" of any criticism of the event. Jenny does however provide us with a fairly substantial list of things not to be critical about, including but i'm sure not limited to;

x The wider timing of the event in reference to the 'progression' of the debate surrounding climate change

x The date, in reference to July 7th bombings

x The location

X A "jet-setting collection of rock stars and of B-list celebs playing at being day-trip greenies"

Perhaps paying lip-service to those within and outside of the party who will want at least a tokenistic display of irritation with the event. Jenny continues, noting that we should be encouraged in spite of these facts:

the event will generate a virtual mountain range of cynical texts and emails, .....But .... can we please take a day to celebrate the fact that climate change awareness is (once again) going mainstream?

If only all the arguments raised by Jenny were couched in such amazingly self-defeating terms. Thankfully it seems unlikely that Jenny's demand will be conceded by many on the homogeneous sounding left she makes reference to. For many of those i've talked to about the party (the cited example of the Socialist Party are one among many) for every mention of the latest Derek Wall article there are twice as many references to the role of the Green Party in suggested part-privitization schemes, or varied suggestions that the Green Party depend largely on the altruism of civilized businessmen doing civilized business. At the heart of the debate lies an uncertainty about the Green Party's ideological basis, and of course the fundamental failure to stress the importance of class as a basic party principle. What some Green Party members have suggested to me is a reflection of a democratic 'plurality of views' allowed within the party, is perceived by many as the simple incoherence of a party liable to be tossed hither and thither in the face of mobilizing struggle.

HSBC: "Not everyone in the world is equal"

2007-04-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

I realise this is going to be the "topic de jour" for far-left bloggers, but it's rare that the long-suffering foot soldiers are treated to nuggets like these. It's what will be viewed in some quarters as an admission of the unequal and discriminating nature of modern capitalism by one of it's most powerful representatives. It's in this context that a spokesperson for HSBC (the world's 'local bank' we're told) informed a Guardian journalist that, regarding the exclusive use of a branch in Canford Cliffs, Dorset by those with £50,000 or more in savings;

We are trying to treat everyone fairly - not everybody in the world is equal. Some people have higher incomes and need greater services through the bank. These customers demand a better service

How apt! In some sense of course this is a non-story, we didn't need HSBC to tell us the world isn't equal, but the conclusions that have been drawn from this fact - exclusive use by those 'more equal' than others - are why HSBC will quite rightly be the subject of condemnation and perhaps boycott.

With regards to the probable reception of this news item on the left, it does reminds me of those far-leftists I know who always find some of the best company in the free-marketer euro-bashing pro-globalizationists of the Tory right-wing. Both agree that capitalism is by it's nature expansive, revolutionary and ruthless, they just happened to draw different conclusions about the implications of these realities.

Little 'hope' - a lot of contradiction: Searchlight No.382

2007-04-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

A few years or so ago “Joined up thinking” seemed to be the buzzphrase that had captivated the imaginations of those in power in the ‘Westminster village’ – I tried to trace the etymology of the phrase but was largely unsuccessful. I raise the point only because there does seem to be a particular absence of 'joined up thinking' surrounding the issue of how best to deal with the far-right.

On the day that Blair is accused of blaming a spate of murders on 'black culture', the abscence of joined up thinking was painfully apparent in the Latest edition of Searchlight magazine. The frontpage editorial (which went to press before the aforementioned story aired, though it's guaranteed limited coverage in the next edition) outlines the campaign being run both within the pages of the Daily Mirror and within the constituencies in which the BNP is standing as one embodied by the slogan which it has adopted for this purpose: “hope not hate”. Below this editorial we find another column outlining the adventurist policies of a government drive to “deny work, benefits and services to illegal immigrants” (No. 382). Little hope here, it seems for those currently under attack by the Home Secretary. What is perhaps interesting here is the complete failure to comprehensively link this aggressive anti-immigration drive to the wider context of a resurgent far-right movement.

Fascism: What it is and how to fight it

2007-04-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

In order that we may fight fascism we must first understand and be able to characterize the nature of fascism. It will perhaps not surprise readers to find that precise definitions of Fascism and what may constitute Fascist organizations vary greatly.

Perhaps one of the most widely known contemporary theorists on the topic is that of Roger Griffin, who has attempted to provide a general epistemology of fascism. Griffin is among those who have suggested the ability to detect a 'fascist minimum' by which to judge organizations as Fascistic [2]. Underlining the 'Fascistic minimum' for Griffin is a 'mythical core' at the very heart of Fascism aligning rebirth and regeneration from the destitute of democratic liberalism; the crisis expressed by this system providing the vision or 'birth pangs' of a new order [2]. Needless to say the basis of the 'fascistic minimum' is contested though common 'ideological' and 'practical' themes run through many of the characterization of Fascism I intend to outline. Griffin recognizes, as do many theorists writing on the subject, the context for Germany Nazism as occurring during a period of "national re-birth".

Traverso within the ‘Origins of Nazi Violence’ provides one of the most in-depth descriptions of the historical roots of Nazi violence, outlining a view of Nazism strongly aligned with the history of colonial rule - as treatment which were previously reserved for 'natives' by colonial rulers are utilised for the purposes ofNazi rule. Within this colonial period Traverso argues that an anti-univeralist, hierarchical basis for rule is provided from which future Nazi movements could expand. Such rule was implicitly anti-humanitarian, serving to dehumanize native populations as 'less civilized' (read: 'less human') than their oppressors, the links with the Nazi treatment of 'minority' groups seems clearly self-apparent within this account [5].

The 'origin' of fascistic violence is also a topic touched upon by M. Mann within the comprehensive work 'Fascists'. Mann suggests that the violent nature of Fascism can be in part understood in reference to the attempts by such organizations to court the influence of young male leaders [6]. For Mann young men "set the character of Fascism" - a fascism understandable as dependent upon forms of excessive machismo encourging escalating forms of militarism - and Para militarism. These were the same young men who had experienced the nature of these forms first hand from within the 'small political groupings' which sought to inspire the spirit of the Volk [6:151].

It's perhaps possible here to make a distinction that has been noted elsewhere with regards to the clear context within which Mann locates the ideology of fascistic movements namely the cultural, social and political context of a post first-world-war European setting. We can contrast this approach to the suggested general 'trends' Paxon identifies with fascistic movements [8]. The point has been made elsewhere by our comrades in the SWP, that a fixed context-dependent reading of Fascism can mean an inability to respond to the changing face of Fascism, and the suggested ability to manipulative both Ideology and Practice to serve interests embodied by Fascism [8b]. A tool with which to explore this idea is provided by Paxon. Within 'The anatomy of Fascism' we find a focus upon the practical implications of such movements - Paxon argues that we can't 'essencialise' fascism with narrow unyielding definitions, instead we must look to function of such movements [8]. Such an approach makes sense if we look even briefly at the approach adopted by both Fascist and Nazi organizations after the First World War. Examples from Fascist history are wide-ranging; it is generally acknowledged that Mussolini had to adapt the ideological content of the movement to the role and position of a powerful catholic church with a clear influence among ordinary Italians [9] it has also been noted that Italian fascists could at one point be found in a coalition among other groups, all the while readying themselves with "clubs, knives and pistols" [10:7]. Similarly the incorporation of forms of anti-Semitism originally alien to the nature of Italian fascism suggests the absence to a firm or fixed adherence to unchanging ideology. In contrast to the approach of Griffiths and others Paxon identifies Five “movements" characteristic of fascism, defined not on the basis of ideological content but instead maneuvering tendencies [8].

While Paxon has been criticized by theorists such as Sternhell for the absence of a focus upon ideology, it is perhaps interesting to note that Paxon makes a point which we may find echoes of in the characterization of Neo-Marxist approaches. Paxon in fact suggests that much of the 'revolutionary anti-capitalist' far-right left capitalism untouched, suggesting that the bourgeoisie viewed the movement as initially favorable to its interest [8]. We can of course find echoes of this view within the work of Gramsci, a point we shall now turn to.

Within 'What is fascism and how to fight it' Trotsky outlines what may be described as a Marxist-Leninist theory of fascism. Trotsky was of course writing during a period in which the comintern line expressed via the German Communist Party equated Social Democracy with variant forms of 'Social Fascism' - criminally failing to make the distinction between Social Democracy and Fascism, and thus provide the sufficient analysis of the specific nature of fascism. This is a fact made more poignant by the relatively longer gestation period of the German Communist party - and the hindsight provided by the experiences of the Italian Communist Party [1]. What is perhaps most interesting about Trotsky's writings on the subject of fascism is the clear absence of a viable revolutionary party and the disastrous implications for the proletariat. Trotsky notes the "weakness and strategic importance" of the revolutionary party during a relatively mature revolutionary situation [1]. While it may be clear that we are not in a “mature revolutionary situation” today, the absence of such a revolutionary party - even in the most embryonic of forms - is painfully apparent.

Trotsky notes that Gramsci alone managed to recognize the real threat posed by Fascism within the Italian Communist Party. Of course Gramsci was jailed in 1926 during a period of heightened fear following an alleged attack on the life of Mussolini in Italy and wrote his famous 'Prison Notebooks' whilst captive [4]. Within 'Democracy and fascism' Gramsci suggests, mirroring the argument outlined by Paxon to some extent, the role fascism played in reducing the minimal democratic standard prevailing within Italy during a pre-fascist period in its attacks on the labor movement. Though Gramsci argues that the bourgeoisie was unable to control the fascist movement whose services it originally served.

Perhaps one of the messages Trotsky articulates most clearly is the clear need to utilize a principled Leninist approach to the tactic of the united front in order that we may combat the implicit aims of Fascistic movements: the attempts to destroy “even that minimum to which the democratic system has been reduced.. The purpose for which it was designed” [10].

[1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm
[2] Fascism: Oxford Readers - Edited by R. Griffin
[3] "Vision of the perceived crisis of the nation betokening birth-pangs of a new order" – Fascism
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci#Imprisonment
[5] Traverso - Origins of Nazi Violence
[6] Michael Mann - Fascists
[7] Paxon - 'The Anatomy of Fascism'
[8] International Socialism: 112 / Autumn 2006
[8b] Jim Wolfreys notes for example that M. Mann characterises Le Pen's 'Front National' as "rightist populist" and not Fascist.
[9] A fact perhaps poignantly illustrated by those pictures that display Mussolini stripped of the military regalia he appeared to wear in most public depictions, swapped for the clothes of a bourgeoisie gentleman upon meeting prominent church leaders.
[10] http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1924/11/democracy_fascism.htm

Left RSS News Feeds

2007-04-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Over on urban 75 i've been compiling a list of the various Left RSS news feeds available online, with the hope of eventually correlating a fairly comprehensive list. I've not included independent political bloggers, which obviously deserve another category, largely because I fear I would be chained to my computer for the next five years. If you know of any other party or campaign affiliated blogs / RSS feeds, let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear about them. The categories i've used are perhaps a little crude - but practical.

Anarchist

A-infos
Libcom Newswire
Schnews Feed
Class War Feed
Wombles News

General News

Indymedia U.K.
People's Weekly World (CPUSA)

General Party

Scottish Socialist Party Feed
Respect Feed
Socialist Unity Network
Green Party News
Socialist Action

Labour Party

Bloggers4Labour
John4leader Feed

Stalinist

New Communist Party - 'London Communist' feed
Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

Student Movement

Student Broad Left

Trad. Marxist

SPGB(1904)

Trotskyist

Solidarity (more AWL feeds here)
Socialist Appeal Feed
Workers Revolutionary party Feed
ICFI - International Committee of the Fourth International
Socialist Worker (U.K) Feed

Prospects for the Labour Party: A Critique of the Socialist Party

2007-04-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Prospects for the Labour Party: A Critique of the Socialist Party

It may be said that in many ways the history of the far-left is the history of the labour party. From the reprimands of Lenin on the nature of 'far left communism' to the later-day Trotskyist involvements in Labour. Within this piece I intend to analyse the characterisation of Labour and the subsequent implications of this theory. In analysing the prospects of involvement for Marxists in labour it might be helpful to provide an overview of the situation "as it stands".

The Socialist Party of England & Wales tells us that the Labour Party became a "totally bourgeois party in the 1990s" [1] suggesting that we can now largely categorise Labour alongside Conservative / Lib-dem parties, a move away from the bourgeoisie-worker party characterisation of old.What form has this bourgeoisification said to have taken? It is possible to summarise three or four basic points upon which this characterisation is based; 1) The lack of a necessitated link between Labour and the TU movement 2) dwindling membership figures obscured by corporate sponsors ("constituency delegates ...outnumbered by corporate sponsors") 3) A lack of real democracy ("Real socialists have either been systematically expelled or dropped out of the party. The rank and file is there to merely rubber stamp the decisions made above.") linked in part by dwindling TU representation at conference.

Disaffiliation

The characterising analysis of the Socialist Party as a "full bourgeois party" would suggest that the Socialist Party would extricate itself completely of the affairs of potential leadership bids, in much the same way as any far-left Marxist party would deem it ridiculous to orientate itself towards the posturing of potential Tory candidates. This is not the case however, we are told that "We believe that if they are sincere .... those in affiliated trade unions should support John McDonnell's campaign for the leadership." A curious acknowledgement of the base of Trade Union support apparent within the Labour Party. Why would the Socialist Party involve themselves in this tokenistic display of 'solidarity' for the internal squabbling of a bourgeoisie party? The inherent contradictions of this policy are painfully clear. An understand of the characterisation of a bourgeois-workers party is helpful here, the Socialist Party outlines this conception as one in which there exists "a party with bourgeois at the top but has a working-class base"[7]. The assumption here is that we can now equate the base of support - reflected in large part by most TU organisations - with the support afforded the Tory party and its kin. A patently dangerous fallacy.

IT is important to glance again at some of the characterising features of this 'bourgeois party' - the first example cites the lack of a 'necessitated' orientation towards Labour. The problematic nature of this characterisation is not hard to see. "It is no longer the case that there is an unbreakable link between the Labour Party and the Trade Unions" [3]. This is essentially an empty truism. The labour party rules state that Trade Union bodies cannot allow regions to affiliate to other opposition political parties which has meant in reality that fire-fighters union FBU has disaffiliated from labour as has the RMT.

In this sense it may be said that these examples show that of course disaffiliation is a possibility, as it always has been. But what prospects do these examples offer for a unified trade union movement? The examples cited provide a picture of fragmented political representation "the London Region of the FBU had voted to support Respect while the Scottish Region may providing funding to the SNP" [3]. Within the RMT disaffiliation is reflected in the patchy and unstable network of political support upon which it has become dependent - first affiliated to the SSP, on 26 October the RMT "voted to reverse its 2003 decision to affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party." [4]. Calls for discussion upon the "the crisis of working class representation" seem apt during a period in which the turn away from labour has lead to variant forms of either political crisis or simply an apolitical trade union movement. With the "absence of any viable political alternative" is it clear to see how the argument may be made that this leads to forms of depoliticisation. While a supportive journal of the Scottish Socialist Party points out itself that "the SSP, as the most advanced political left formation in Britain (politically and by size) does not have sufficient parliamentary representation to significantly advance the RMT’s interests" [3]. Of course the Socialist Party is involved in the process of campaigning for forms of new representative organisations which would be able to provide political representation - though they remain in their embryonic "campaign for" stages.[8]

Dwindling membership figures, the role of corporate sponsors

A point upon which the Socialist Party might seem to be upon firmer ground might be thought to be the subject of membership figures and the increasing dominance of corporate sponsorship in the Labour Party. "Labour membership has halved since Tony Blair became prime minister" reads the Guardian [5], in turn The Socialist Party cites the 'corporate sponsors' creeping in at conference and of course readers of the news and anyone attending LP Conference will have been treated to an array of corporate sponsored speaking events. It's clear that there is a section of traditional old labour supporters turning away from the party - but is it on this basis that Marxists turn away from the Labour party? Should Marxists refuse to involve themselves in political organisations sullied with corporatism? My answer is a resounding no to both of course.

It is ironic that the Socialist Party members friend should in turn become its greatest foe on this issue: "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Often cited by Socialist Party members as a book others on the far-left should read (presumably before waking up and joining them in the 21st century) it provides a crystal clear analysis - at least in part - as to how Marxists should relate to mass reformist organisations, and I quote:

"If you want to help the "masses" and win the sympathy and support of the "masses" .... must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found... in those institutions, societies and associations -- even the most reactionary—in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found"[6]

No doubt the accusatory phrases will be resounding loud now: "this approach is out-dated!" A tired argument - to adopt a good cliche: we don't abandon the theory of gravity just because it's getting old! "This approach fails to account for the internal changes within the party!" - we have of course already seen that the Socialist Party in part acknowledges the existence of "proletarian or semi-proletarian" base of support (however threatened) within the party in its gestures towards McDonnell's campaign, and the potential TU support this campaign may be able to accrue, supported by the SP. The logical extension of Leninism is an orientation which turns towards those organisations within which the the working class can be found, however mired these organisations may be in the morass of corporate sponsorship or big-business; in essence: "Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary organisations" whenever and wherever necessary. [6]

[1] http://www.marxist.net/openturn/intro/script.htm?8.htm

[3] http://redflag.org.uk/frontline/15/15unions.html

[4] http://www.workersliberty.org/node/7185

[5] http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,9061,1274855,00.html

[6] http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch06.htm

[7] http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/conf2002/c2frame.htm?electoral.html

[8] An aside, Labour is often conceptualised as a "Broad Church" formation, it's perhaps interesting to note the way in which this conceptualisation has been mimicked in different ways by Socialists outside of labour. A topic for a different post.