Letters

Hysteria and bigotry

Julie Mills addressing the question of paedophilia (Weekly Worker September 26) still skirts round the principle of the matter. ‘Love of children, sexual attraction to children or a child’ are the actual meanings of the word - but in the eye of the public, thanks to the press hysteria, this is inseparable from infanticide, brutality and rape.

A paedophile in public perception is a person who wishes to abuse and defile children. Anyone who has a sexual relationship with ‘a child’ (presumably anyone under 16), no matter how tender, caring, loving, mutual and totally consensual is, regardless of these facts, ipso facto regarded as abusing his/her companion. Totally consensual and voluntary sex between someone under 16 is viewed in the eyes of the state to be impossible under any circumstances, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

This leads to the most horrendous oppression of perfectly normal, caring human beings who are banged up, vilified and frequently tortured in prison - simply because of an artificial line drawn in the sand someone has called ‘the age of consent’. Why, for example, could Jerry Lee Lewis or Charlie Chaplin happily enjoy sexual relationships quite legally with girls under 16, while the same relationship here would have them horse-whipped, thrown in jail and the key thrown away?

Why is a ‘vile child molester’ - whose crime was recently revealed to have been a year-long loving, entirely consensual relationship with a 15-year old girl friend and who received for his perversion five years in jail - free to meet and fall in love with a girl of the same age in Holland, Spain or parts of America? Why can an older man with a 16-year old girlfriend be allowed to conduct a perfectly normal relationship here and be regarded perhaps as ‘a lucky bastard’ or a ‘sad middle-age in search of lost youth’ but suffer no penalty - but in parts of the USA, where the consent law is 18 or 21, be treated as an abuser and a paedophile?

The whole thing is shot through with contradictions, hysteria and bigotry. The terms ‘paedophile’ and ‘sex abuser’ are inseparable from the debate around ages of consent, and public misperceptions. We must differentiate between real abuse and simply having different sexual mores than the law permits. Real abuse of children takes place all the time. It is vile and horrendous and we ought to help young people defend themselves against abusers. But under-age sex with an older partner when voluntarily entered into is that young person’s right, and we ought to defend them and their partners against the witch hunt against them. ‘No’ means ‘no’ at any age, but ‘yes’ also can actually mean ‘yes’, no matter what the state says is allowed.

Frank Cooper
Sheffield

Childish things

Last week’s Weekly Worker letter’s page and review section (September 26) seemed to announce the birth of a new party - the Revolutionary Children’s Party (RCP) (sic).

Am I right in saying that at precisely the point when the International Socialist Group are on the brink of collapse, two of their leaders (sic) decide to write to the Weekly Worker to lambast them for “Partyism”, “primitive accumulation of cadre”, and fake “esprit de corps”? As far as I can remember, they have never contributed to the paper before - no letters, no articles, no theory, no nothing ... zero. It is bad news if the ISG is dead, but, if it is, its leaders (sic) should let it rest in peace. Lashing out at the CPGB and rapprochement at a crisis moment for their own organisation represents the unprincipled politics of the wilderness, conducted by two smirking neurotics ... these nasty children belong between the pages of Lord of the flies.

Even revolutionaries can behave like children when they are treated like them by their party. Paul Ellis wrote last week about the need for tact and constructive criticism in relation to Socialist News. He says, “Although the paper is obviously lacking, there is nothing within it that is offensive.” The battened down banality within this formulation makes me itch - unctuous, ever so humble Uriah Heapism, lacking in vision and smothered in servility. Take a medium-sized breath, exhale and feather thinking like this disappears to reveal a nastier, cowardly mentality, whose only movement is the imperceptible, but very painful recoiling from the future.

Talking of a waste of breath, is Chris Knight mad? Or is he a sociology lecturer in East London? I suppose it’s OK to indulge in theoretical chatter (sic) when you are being paid handsomely by the state, but when the working class attempt this voluntarily it might seem a little irrelevant to you - I mean, you are doing it all day. Come the evening you need a little action, a bit of good old activism to keep you healthy, and happy that god is in heaven and things are as they should be. The working class are the working class, a strike is a strike and you are a mad professor who bangs on interminably when it suits you (ie, when you get paid) but would prefer everyone else keep stum and get on with the job of tail-ending the working class, consciously reproducing their spontaneous movement and thereby acting as a negative pole that cannot help even when it wants to.

John Craig’s film review last week betrayed a wide-eyed innocent, in thrall to the cultural popcorn served up by capitalism. It is vital not to allow art and culture to appear as mere appendages to more serious political matters - the bourgeois media does that for us. Alienation and leisure are parts of a larger ideological whole.

It is time for brats like these (and the Weekly Worker) to put away such childish things.

Tom Fryer
London

Concealing defeatism

Ted Jaszynski (Weekly Worker September 19) makes a song and dance about being selectively quoted over his perverse hailing of the overthrow of apartheid as “a victory for imperialism”. Yet restoring his original bet-hedging phrase about it also being “a great victory for the South African masses” does his argument no favours, merely drawing attention to the knack by which defeatism conceals itself beneath a cloak of fence-sitting description. Saying on the one hand victory for the masses, on the other hand victory for imperialism, without making it clear which tendency is decisive, is not dialectics but eclectics, and purely cosmetic in function.

The repudiation of concrete dialectical analysis of development through contradiction, in favour of a lot of woolly, eclectic description, punctuated by the striking of ultra-left poses, also characterises much of the Weekly Worker’s own editorial content, striving to conceal relentless, petty-bourgeois defeatism - over Ireland, South Africa and everything else.

However, it is workday Leninism, not “clairvoyance”, which pays proper attention to the contradictory unfolding of Britain’s forced, snail’s-pace decolonisation of Ireland, or of the earlier forced dismantling of South African apartheid.

By recognising the central role of world imperialist crisis in all developments, comrade Ted might have attempted an answer of his own to the jibes he throws at comrade Roy’s view of slow but decisive imperialist retreat from Ireland (“Why wasn’t British imperialism forced to accept the inevitable 20 years ago? Why hadn’t its rivals enforced their will before now?”) - one based on the actual reality of growing over-production trade war pressures upon British monopoly capitalist decay, rather than sneering provocatively at the limited scale of Irish military success (tell that one to the City of London insurance pool).

And the cure for revisionist muddle afflicting the SACP/ANC leadership politics in South Africa is likewise to be sought in ever closer attention to the analysis of imperialist crisis, not increased doses of ultra-leftism. The SACP indeed printed lots of articles in African Communist in the 1980s which placed the mass national democratic struggle against apartheid firmly within a perspective of eventual overthrow of capitalism and establishment of proletarian dictatorship. But this correct perspective was huckstered into crass ‘instant-communism-or-bust’ tactics only by ultra-lefts, whose tiny presence in South Africa (mostly around black nationalist opportunism, Trot trade union entryism, and in the Kitson circus) was eked out by posturing ‘revolutionary’ softheads in the West.

As the final Gorbachev degeneration took hold, what was best in the revolutionary grasp of South Africa’s communists (along with Cuba and Vietnam, far in advance of most other Third International thinking at the time) got pushed back into full revisionist confusion - sadly with Slovo in his last years echoing some of the worst of Gorbachev’s petty-bourgeois ‘democratic’ smears against proletarian dictatorship. Yet the setback suffered by the SACP lay in its retreat from a defining proletarian dictatorship perspective, and not in any supposed tactical ‘failure’ to judge socialist revolution to be “imminent”. It is doubtful if it ever judged it so, or should have done.

The ultra-lefts were wrong before and remain wrong now. The leadership’s relative ideological retreat (though not sufficient to prevent the ANC/SACP alliance from leading the successful mass overthrow of apartheid, opening huge new revolutionary possibilities in the future) was precisely back in the direction of self-deluding subjective idealism - the stalking ground of right opportunism and ultra-leftism alike.

Above all, making sense of 70 years the Soviet workers’ state, and of its subsequent liquidation, requires neither directionless eclectics (on this hand, but on that hand ...) nor defeatist blindness to the anti-imperialist revolts developing across the world (however “non-communist” most still remain).

What is needed is an analysis which clarifies both the enormous historic significance of those 70 years of proletarian dictatorship and the way that world imperialist crisis has never been remotely dislodged from its central role in driving on world class struggle development. Misunderstanding both key phenomena in the end cost the deluded Moscow revisionists their jobs-for-life, sadly dragging the never-defeated workers’ state down with them. Conversely, getting clarified on these questions is what will enable the modern world proletariat to complete its education as revolutionary masters of society.

Giles Barralet
Bristol

Micro-waved broth

Eddie Ford’s excursion into the becalmed waters of British folk pop (Weekly Worker September 19) revealed the problems involved in what musical forms and traditions really represent when one forgets that the essence of music is its invisibility. It is the human, creative exploration of sound. Misunderstanding this elusive concept means that one can become fixated on music’s exchange value under capitalism. Something of course capitalism positively encourages. Huge financial and ideological benefits accrue to the ownership of music’s invisible secret - its freedom.

Here is the heart of Eddie’s problem:

“All musical labels and categories are to a certain extent artificial and constrictive. Norma Waterson is a prime case of this.”

Eddie is dimly aware of an absent essence, but thinks of it as a fact of life when instead the pursuit of silence of and for itself is to engage with the fundamental human need for music. By not chasing this idea he has to be content with cataloguing a nostalgic mix and match of styles. Music journalism is notoriously crafty in exciting the object, fetishising through the use of myth.

Eddie goes on to say:

“Let us hope that the hype attending these awards will help to break down the considerable prejudice directed against folk music.” 

Surely Eddie must realise that the attending hype might mean a few more punters buy the album Norma Waterson, but it will not break down - quite the opposite, it will build up prejudice. The term ‘folk music’ can represent a denuded commodity category, or it can be understood through tradition and modes of social production. Thus, whenever musical forms or categories are successfully ‘fused’ in modern music, they are always imbued with an understanding of context and contradiction. Instead of this dynamic fusion process, Norma Waterson and folk pop reminds me of eating a micro-waved broth in a olde-worlde theme pub piping out easy listening.

John Atyeo
Bristol