Letters

Debater tricks

Duncan Chapel’s ‘Fabricating views’, largely though not entirely, consists of student debating society tricks to evade my arguments without actually addressing them (Letters, September 17).

It is convenient to work backwards, because the point of my comments on comrade Chapel’s arguments in my article, ‘New proscriptions for old’ (April 30), to which his letter responds, was mainly about issues he treats at the end of his letter.

In comrade Chapel’s original post he charged the CPGB with going into Left Unity with a preconceived intention of creating a front organisation: “The Communist Platform in Left Unity had its own press, its own organisation, its own membership obligations: flat-packed and ready for deployment into any broad formation that would have it.” I responded that in Left Unity we had intended to work together with the Socialist Platform, but split with them over the undemocratic conduct of the founding meeting (and in particular the veto attributed to the silent non-attenders), and hence created Communist Platform.

Comrade Chapel responds that this is all irrelevant, because “Those are different bodies and different years”. This is merely dishonest. The events are all reported in this paper and available there. And in any case, since the formation of Communist Platform was after our participation in Socialist Platform, his version of the story is still inconsistent with his original charge. Comrade Chapel should just admit that he got the facts wrong in his original post and that the “flat-pack” charge was unfounded.

On Anti-Capitalist Resistance and Scotland, I am happy to be corrected by being told that Socialist Resistance (or perhaps Socialist Outlook?) decided not to organise in Scotland before the formation of ACR. Since ACR is linked to the Fourth International, and comrade Chapel’s Substack is largely committed to reprinting 1970s Mandelite material, I think I am justified in treating ACR as the latest iteration of the section of the Fourth International of which I was a member when it was the International Socialist Group (which did organise in Scotland).

I do think that separate organisation in Scotland is an example of Scots nationalism, even if comrade Chapel does not want to think so: I don’t think there is any other possible justification for separate workers’ organisations facing a common capitalist state. The date at which the Mandelites separated organisation in Scotland (which comrade Chapel doesn’t tell us) is a diversion from this political point.

On Podemos, it is possible that comrade Chapel has misunderstood me. I wrote that “Duncan Chapel defends Mandelism, which ostensibly permits factions (usually called “tendencies”), but subject to the continued control of the apparatus. He is involved in a contradiction here, since he opposes the Podemos model.” He interprets this as being “On Podemos he has the disagreement upside-down. My objection was never that Podemos permitted tendencies. It was that its leadership permitted them on paper, while making it impossible for them to function.”

My point, however, was precisely that this view involved comrade Chapel in a contradiction. For two reasons. Firstly because Mandelite organisational practice “permits [factions] on paper, while making it impossible for them to [actually win]”. Witness, most recently, the split of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, in which the Mandelites split to prevent factionalism (the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty published documents on this in an article entitled ‘A harmful split in the French far left’ (December 12 2022). There are many older examples.

Secondly, comrade Chapel claims to advocate “an organisational culture that is fraternal, ‘fostering freedom of criticism and allowing for the formation of internal factions within a framework of general loyalty’, set against both the cult of personality and the far-left habit of turning revolutionary parties into permanent battlegrounds”, and also to be “against apparatus control of factions”, the reality is that you can only prevent “turning revolutionary parties into permanent battlegrounds” by apparatus control of factions.

Comrade Chapel says that “My piece turns on Trotsky’s distinction between a factional struggle undertaken under compulsion, because a political line requires it, and factionalism as a permanent condition, which he called a scourge.” In my opinion Trotsky was just plain wrong on this. As someone commented on Reddit not that long ago, “The Bolsheviks were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Get over it”. The Bolsheviks were a public faction of the RSDLP between 1903 and 1917, for 14 years. How long factions need to last depends on the nature of the political differences involved.

If you refuse to accept that there will be long-term factional struggles, you are forced either to self-silence or ‘tone down’ for the sake of unity until this becomes utterly untenable (the Mandelites’ policy in a series of broad front projects) or to split (the Mandelites’ approach in the NPA split, and other cases). If the Bolsheviks had pursued this policy they would either have self-silenced, or created a sect like the DeLeonist Socialist Labour Parties (and the modern far left).

Finally, I wrote that comrade Chapel, “along with the Mandelite majority, seeks the victory of the US-Nato proxy war in Ukraine (and in order to do so, denies that it is a proxy war, denies that 2014 was a coup, denies that there are far-right elements in the Ukraine government and armed forces). In this respect, Chapel’s politics are those of Max Shachtman.” Comrade Chapel replies that “Macnair is welcome to try to quote a sentence in which I call for a Nato victory. I am, like the Fourth International, for the dissolution of Nato - not for its victory.”

Comrade Chapel writes this in a week in which the death in a road accident of a British army officer on active service in Ukraine (probably in a support or training role) was reported. Ukraine is dependent on military supplies and subsidies from European Nato countries. The UK is a co-belligerent on the Ukrainian side in this war, and so are the US and European Nato countries. For comrade Chapel to deny that he, and ACR, are supporting the British capitalist state in war, because they issue a platonic call for the dissolution of Nato, is like Entente social-chauvinists in 1914-18 saying that they called for the dissolution of the Entente, but it remained necessary to defend the self-determination of Serbia and Belgium. It is at best self-deception.

Mike Macnair
Oxford

Vote George

No, the state pension was not just supposed to top up private provision, as if occupational and private pensions had been the norm in 1918 or in 1946. Life expectancy in 1946 is irrelevant to the present debate, since what were then the recent figures had been warped by World War II.

£13,000 per annum is a pitiful pension by international standards - we already pay it later than many other countries, and you will soon have to wait until beyond average male life expectancy. Why is dignity in retirement unaffordable only here? The triple lock puts money in the pockets of the people who spend it, thereby injecting it into the consumer economy, and thus employing the young. Yet, if it takes you over the income tax threshold, then you should have to pay tax on it until that threshold has been increased for everyone.

It is for the present and future wars that we have moved in half a decade from staying at home to protect our elders, to wishing them dead through what could logically be nothing less than the abolition of the state pension. The pro-war Green Party wants only a double lock, with the 2.5% rule abolished. On behalf of the whole country, as is always integral to any parliamentary election, Holborn and St Pancras should return George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain.

David Lindsay
Lanchester

WPB bigotry

The Workers Party of Britain is absolutely right that we need a socialist voice in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election against all the mainstream parties, including Labour and the Greens. On the Greens in particular, the WPB has correctly argued that this is a liberal outfit, supporting the war in Ukraine and the EU, and not an alternative for the working class, who despise Labour.

However, the WPB cannot be a socialist and working class voice so long as its campaign makes crass and bigoted attacks on trans people. Such positions echo the politics of reactionaries and enemies of socialism, while totally undermining the Workers Party’s challenge to Labour and the Greens. The precondition for us and any other decent socialists to support the WPB in Holborn and St Pancras must be an end to this pandering to rightwing reaction.

It is one thing for someone to hold socially conservative views and disagree with gender theories. But it is quite another for a self-proclaimed socialist to seek political capital by constantly attacking trans people, one of the most marginalised groups in Britain and (together with Muslims) the favourite target of reactionaries. Such politics only position the Workers Party as a transmission belt for political reaction, which is ultimately directed against Muslims, women, LGBTQ+ people and the working class.

The goal of socialists must be to unite the working class against the ruling class. But the precondition for this is to stand in defence of all oppressed groups. Just as we defend Muslims and oppose attacks against their right to wear religious symbols, so must we defend the right of trans people to live their lives the way they want.

We say to the Workers Party: If you agree to cease making cheap political capital on the backs of trans people, we would be happy to support you in your campaign.

Spartacist League
email

Dubious nats

With depressing predictability, the antics of nationalist politicians (not to mention Donald Trump) have resulted in the peoples of the British Isles squabbling fruitlessly amongst themselves. In contention are questions like ‘Was medieval Wales colonised?’ and ‘Did Scotland join the union willingly in 1707?’ - questions which socialists should see as being of extremely dubious importance.

In 1707, if every Scot up and down the country had unanimously declared their desire for perpetual union with England, would that mean that future Scots had to shut up about independence for ever more? Of course not. By a similar token, what would it matter even if Scotland had been subject to a bloody conquest in that same year? All that matters is how things stand in the present.

Our thinking should not be beholden to nationalist grudges, bourgeois legal technicalities or the legitimacy of kings. Historical grievances only matter to people whose minds have been captured by regressive nationalist thinking. There are people who have begun to personally identify with some mythical idea of a nation, so that historical crimes against that nation are experienced in the present as attacks on the self. For such people, things like Oliver Cromwell’s 1651 massacre in Dundee are extremely important, because, in their minds, they exist as part of an organic entity with the victims. It is as if part of their own self was slaughtered on those cold streets centuries ago. This is obviously nonsense. Such thinking obscures present material reality behind a story about the past which is at once both fantastical and trivial, as well as being a hindrance to the cause of socialism.

More generally, the job of socialists is not and cannot be to adjudicate age-old national beefs. Every population on Earth came to be where they are by displacing or killing some long-lost predecessor. We are all of us descended from rapists, murderers, genocide perpetrators, colonisers and thieves. We have also all had ancestors who were murdered, raped and stolen from. Everyone’s hands are bloody and everyone has been bloodied at the hands of others. There is simply no rectifying this, no way of undoing what has been done, no way of putting things right that will not generate yet more injustices and more grievances for the future. Ongoing crimes, such as Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, must, of course, be stopped. But there is no way of turning the clock back on the distant past without doing even more wrong to the people of the present. For example, what US colonisers did to indigenous people was appalling, but even worse would be trying to make up for it by displacing tens of millions of modern Americans.

To reiterate, what is really important about these nationalist debates is what they mean in the present - and specifically for the cause of socialism. In understanding this, a big clue has been given to us by Donald Trump. Why would Trump take this moment to begin agitating for the breakup of the UK? On one level, it can be seen as one of his typical negotiating ploys - an attempt to pile pressure onto a ‘partner’, which has been marginally less compliant recently than usual (eg, over Iran and Israel). But, beyond this, it represents a geopolitical repositioning at a time when US and UK interests are becoming less and less aligned.

The US is pivoting towards Asia for its struggle against the Chinese. As such, Europe’s relative importance to it is diminishing. The UK’s usefulness as a military ally has long been declining, along with the country itself, and there is now a serious question as to what it could actually bring to American efforts in the far east. Meanwhile, relations on the European end are being strained by the huge flows of refugees generated by American military adventurism, whilst people in European countries are increasingly intolerant of the US’s underwriting of Israeli atrocities. In this new world, a Balkanised Britain may well suit the US. If you have fewer resources with which to dominate an increasingly recalcitrant Europe, it helps to keep it in as weakened and fractured a state as possible.

It is ironic how a key grievance for many Scottish nationalists is the UK’s exit from the EU, given that Scottish independence would replicate many of the same problems. One thing that Brexit demonstrated is how winning formal political freedoms is largely irrelevant if you aren’t in a position to exercise them. Obviously, immigration was a big factor for many people who voted to leave. In theory, Brexit was meant to free the UK to unilaterally reduce immigration, as it was no longer obligated to open its doors to the rest of Europe. In practice, the decade following the vote has seen significantly more immigration than the decade before. Why? Because the UK now relies on continually expanding its tax base via immigration in order to avoid fiscal catastrophe, a dynamic which infamously came to a head in the aftermath of Covid under Boris Johnson.

In essence, the formal freedoms the UK ‘won’ through Brexit were overcome by the demands of maintaining British capitalism, and there is little reason to think the same pressures wouldn’t undermine an independent Scotland. Indeed, such a Scotland would likely be in an even worse position to resist the pressures of international capital. What James Connolly said about Ireland has its equivalent here: “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.”

Kieran Jeffs
email

Absurd YP

For more than a year, a number of publications - including Weekly Worker and The Left Lane, which I edit - have debated Your Party’s difficulties and, to be charitable, its failure to thrive. A wide range of theories and evidence have appeared. These have included lack of transparency, ‘top-downism’, a replay of Labourism, strategical incoherence, careerism, no campaigning, and so on.

Over the weekend of September 12-13, however, at a major political and cultural festival attended by +17,000 activists in the seaside city of Ostend, Belgium, I saw new evidence of its essential (and depressing) absurdity as an organisation. The occasion was the annual extravaganza called ManiFiesta, put on since 2009 by the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB). I note that in last week’s Weekly Worker in a letter titled ‘Digital Peronism’, political theorist Anton Jäger mentioned that “uniquely among Belgian and European parties, the PTB has had measurable success in growing its base in the past years” (though he made some criticisms as well).

I was in Ostend to assess, first-hand, how the PTB functioned and campaigned as a party and report back to my readers. Most of the +2,500-word piece did that. But then I discovered the Your Party ‘road show’ was in town and dropped in to a session. YP leader Jeremy Corbyn was one of more than 250 speakers from around the globe. He’s a perennial.

But, to my surprise, YP chair Jenn Forbes - Corbyn selected her for the post - was in the large audience of more than 500 activists in a session on “optimism and pessimism” in the current conjuncture. Soon after Corbyn announced her presence as a panel member, Forbes intervened from the floor. My piece on the conference, titled ‘Pride, optimism - front and centre at the Workers Party of Belgium festival’ (theleftlane2024.substack.com), reported her remarks.

Just like Corbyn, Forbes astoundingly did not say a single word about the progress - or lack thereof - made by YP in the past 12 months. Quoting the article: “… rather [she] told the large audience of her closeness to Corbyn. She recalled with pride ‘a compliment’ he had made during the time of the World Cup tournament about her political strengths as YP chair. Jeremy ‘told me I have shown the same defensive abilities as the Italian team,’ Forbes said to the ManiFiesta crowd.” Only later did I realise that Italy never even made it to this year’s World Cup.

The article concluded with a few facts, about which the only people in the large hall who would know were Corbyn, Forbes and I: “Forbes returns to England after losing a summertime vote of no confidence in her as chair, facing an executive committee that has been plagued by multiple resignations, and as the chair of a party that has not released its verified membership figures for more than nine months.”

I am still puzzled how this bizarre speech fits into a wider critique of Your Party. Can anyone assist?

Alan Story
The Left Lane

YP expulsion

Chris Williamson was until recently a dual member of Your Party and the Workers Party and a supporter of Republic Your Party. He has now been expelled from Your Party pending appeal and has resigned from the Workers Party.

Republic YP continues to support left unity and dual membership and can confirm that Chris remains a supporter of ours. He is continuing his appeal against expulsion and seeks support from all Your Party members.

Republic YP
email

More waffle

Looking at Tam Dean Burn’s barrage balloon of waffle (Letters, September 17) in response to my letter (September 10), let me spell it out for him that my tone and manner of writing are no concern of his. You write how you want and I’ll write how I see fit. If you don’t like it, comrade, ignore it.

The fundamental issue is this: can we use older forms (such as Brecht’s learning plays) today without an accompanying deep critique of history and theory? I think this has to remain an open question that would be played out in the concrete, although never definitively solved. Burn’s answer, on the other hand, is a naive one. As he told me in an interview a few years back, things like Brecht’s learning plays and other material he revived in the Workers’ Theatre Movement redux of the 1980s are valid, period.

Rather than this revivalist approach being the object of critique, Burn fills in this bare outline with the heavily crayoned smears of his own subjective taste for certain people and things. This subjective approach will not work in creating any kind of cultural movement. For every Darko Suvin poetry fan I’ll find you 20 who think it’s the worst type of shite. Such attempts to universalise subjective judgments are worse than useless, whereas the road of critique at least gives the movement a chance to come together beyond the ‘I like/she hates’ of everyday banality.

Readers of Burn’s letter will see, if you can wade through it, that this is an individual who does not like his cultural loved ones to be criticised. I see ex-Socialist Workers Party member Esther Leslie is the latest to be lit up in the bathetic glow of Burn’s reverence. It reminds me of an exchange back in this journal in 2008, when Burn got incredibly upset because I wouldn’t simply agree with the injunction that folk artist Ewan MacColl was one of the greatest artists that Britain had produced. My crime was picking up on the critical approach that historian Ben Harker had employed in his biography. Now, I am a fan of Ewan MacColl’s and Peggy Seeger’s music, as it happens, but to merely parade my subjective taste and shout ‘Great, great, great!’ is useless, and instantly alienates people sceptical about such art. Critique and understanding, on the other hand, begin to make things relatable; putting things on a pedestal alienates them and can only result in a ‘groovy gang’ method of clique-building.

Finally, can I assure readers that I think acting is the most noble of the arts. Not only have I seen the film Carry on behind five times: I am putting the finishing touches to a Christmas extravaganza, provisionally entitled Lawrence’s gravy boat of love.

I was thinking of casting Burn as one of the gravy granules. I can tell him he failed the audition. Hey-ho.

Lawrence Parker
London

Fascist fight

I read with admiration the article by our Australian comrade of the need for a militia to fight for socialism and against fascism (‘A demand of enduring relevance’ September 17). Fascist militias exist already in Britain. The loyalists in the north of Ireland pre-exist the emerging blackshirts, visible recently in Dover and Portsmouth.

In Athens we had a valid slogan: “A good fascist is a dead fascist.” Here in Britain we debate refusing platforms to fascists: the struggle has moved on and the time for debate is over. Battle must ensue. The general strike in Dublin in 1913 required protection for striking workers: the Irish Citizen Army emerged, which fought in 1916 and later. Militias were crucial in the early struggle against Franco in Spain.

The Mensheviks in the Labour Party will not defeat fascism. Keir Starmer was a proto-fascist (Benito Mussolini’s political journey began in the Socialist Party). No, the current Labour Party is full of corrupt carpet-baggers with zero connection with the poor and the workers of Britain.

So let’s begin building a militia here in England. My organisation, Bolshevik Tendency, has voted unanimously for this position. La France Insoumise has such a militia and their elimination of a fascist in Marseille made the fascists think: ‘Will I give my life for fascism?’

Let’s make the fascist vermin think again in Britain. For a workers’ militia!

K Sean
Bolshevik Tendency

Anti-Zionist ‘lie’

Yassamine Mather writes: “He [Ed Miliband] visited the country as a young man and recounts with joy picking oranges on the Nachshonim kibbutz (established on land seized in the 1948 Arab-Israel war)” (‘Demand the whole package’ September 17).

Eh ... No! All an alert reader has to do is ask the question, ‘Is Nachshonim within the area suggested by the UN partition plan to the Jewish state?’ Look it up on Google, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini or in any history book: the answer is yes and I am well persuaded that Yassamine Mather knows this.

But she can comfortably lie, knowing that her tale meets the Zeitgeist of the anti-Israel stream - unless, of course, any and all land held by Israel is ‘illegal’.

John Davidson
email

Anti-Zionist truth

Yassamine Mather is, err, not guilty of lying.

This is what Gemini has to say: Kibbutz Nachshonim was established on land seized during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Founded in 1949 by Egyptian Jewish immigrants and refugees, the kibbutz was built near the borders of the depopulated Palestinian village of Majdal Yaba (also known as Majdal al-Sadiq).

While the residential core of the kibbutz sits just south of the official village footprint, its agricultural fields and surrounding cultivated valley utilised fertile land that had belonged to Palestinian villagers before they were displaced during the 1948 conflict.

Editors
London