worker A paper of Marxist polemic and Marxist unity weekly The internet in the epoch of decline: Paul Demarty on claims for new digital media No 1003 Thursday March 27 2014 Towards a Communist Party of the European Union n Letters and debate n Russia and sanctions n ULU bans SWP n Miners’ Great Strike www.cpgb.org.uk £1/€1.10 How to vote on March 29 2 March 27 2014 1003 worker weekly LETTERS Letters may have been shortened because of space. Some names may have been changed Ahistorical Ben Lewis states that “Carl Simmonds doggedly insists on asserting that Karl Kautsky, VI Lenin, Lars Lih and I hold the working class, ‘in disdain’ …” (Letters, March 20). I’ll plead guilty to doggedness, but not the rest. It should be apparent to anyone reading my letter in the previous week’s paper (March 13) that Lewis is distorting my argument. I did accuse those who repeat today the mantra that the working class is only capable of trade union rather than socialist consciousness of viewing the working class with disdain. If you doubt there are people who believe this to be a fundamental article of faith of Marxism-Leninism, well, just head over to RevLeft and do a search. Incidentally, this is not a view held by Lars T Lih - see his article online: ‘How a founding document was found, or 100 years of Lenin’s What is to be done?’ The only person on Lewis’s list whom I might conceivably be accusing of holding this view is himself. I say ‘might’ because his butt appears to be so firmly impaled on the metaphorical fence that, despite his two letters, it is still difficult to see what his own position on the contemporary relevance of Lenin’s 1902 formulation is. We may be fundamentally in agreement, but then again we may not be. Lewis accuses me of not understanding the difference between a “clumsy or unsuccessful formulation” of a valid point and an invalid point. I must admit that, while I am perfectly capable of conceiving the distinction in the abstract, I can’t see its relevance to our present discussion. In plain English, making a bad argument in support of a good idea, which your opponents subsequently exploit, is a mistake. We should not repeat that mistake. When people attempt to elevate that mistake to the status of an article of faith of Leninism, then they need to be told that Lenin made a mistake and subsequently abandoned the formulation. As Lenin himself put it, “Obviously, an episode in the struggle against economism has here been confused with a principled presentation of a major theoretical question: namely, the formation of an ideology.” This should be clear enough for anybody. His formulations in WITBD should not be taken as the Marxist position on the relationship between class and ideology. Lih himself has shown that “By 1906 WITBD was already being treated (even by its author) as a document from a superseded episode in party history.” I’ll state again so as not to be misinterpreted that I do not accept the rightwing narrative that WITBD indicates Lenin’s ‘dictatorial tendencies’ or ‘disdain for the working class’ with which Lih is primarily taking issue. However, like any Marxist, Lenin was capable of making mistakes and this formulation was one of them. Lewis repeats his claim that Lih has shown Trotsky’s 1939 account of the issue to be inconsistent with contemporaneous accounts. Lih certainly disagrees with Trotsky’s account, but he has hardly shown it to be unsupportable. What are Lih’s actual arguments? His strongest is Lenin’s short October 1905 article praising Stalin’s repetition of his formulations. This is mentioned by Lewis. However, it is not like this article was any kind of surprise to Trotsky. He deals with it and dismisses its significance in subsequent paragraphs. Other than the 1905 article, Lih’s main argument appears to be the lack of contemporary criticism of Lenin’s formulations by other Iskra supporters. However, the weakness of this argument is that a lack of public criticism, and a basic agreement with Lenin with respect to the ‘economists’ does not necessary signify agreement with him on particular contentious points, such as section 2 of WITBD. I would urge the “lazy readers” of the Weekly Worker, whose laziness I am supposedly encouraging, to read the online transcript of sections 8 and 9 from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 1903 congress and judge for themselves. It seems to me that the supporters of Rabochee Delo, Martynov and Akimov are attempting to use the issue to drive a wedge between Lenin and other supporters of Iskra, in particular Plekhanov. As far as academic historians go, I don’t think Lih does a bad job. Many of his points are interesting and his position is preferable to openly anti-communist historians like Service and Conquest. My beef is rather with those who attempt to elevate Lih’s views to a new orthodoxy, and use them to attack Trotskyism and promote some kind of neo-Kautskyite revival, as if the world hasn’t moved on and Marxism developed since the Erfurt programme. The CPGB’s attempt to portray groups on the Trotskyist left as latter-day ‘economists’is in my view ahistorical tripe. In regard to Lewis’ final points about discussion of internal party differences in public, I’m not in principle opposed to public discussion. However, there is nothing in Lenin that suggests a party doesn’t have the right to set the bounds of such a discussion in accordance with its party statutes. As to whether the Socialist Party has used this right wisely, I think Ben Lewis should probably address that question to someone who is both a member of the Socialist Party and familiar with the points at issue. Carl Simmonds email Dirty hands Regarding the conception that socialist ideas come from outside the working class, where did Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky get their ideas then? From the working class! Socialist ideas don’t just pop into the heads of brilliant thinkers. The founders of Marxism read books about the working class and its history. They listened to workers and lived with them. To create separate compartments for trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness is undialectical. There is a combined interaction between the two: militant trade union consciousness confronts the police, the courts and fights scabs, which can lead to a process of socialist consciousness. Naturally, there are contradictions between the two. Trade unionism works within the boundaries of capitalism, while pushing against those boundaries. Lenin emphasised the contradiction. I think we need to emphasise the unity of these opposites. Most of the daily class struggle is not about taking power: it is the practice ground and school for the working class. We can easily isolate ourselves, like Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party, who in the United States denounced trade unionism as reformist. The fight for socialism means dirtying our hands in the small battles in the unions and communities where we work and live. Earl Gilman email PA openness I was pleased to read Peter Manson’s report of the People’s Assembly recall conference (‘Keep it broad, keep it safe’, March 20). I hope that people reading it won’t be too put off by the undoubtedly problematic arrangement. The Weekly Worker has devoted a lot of detailed coverage to the formation of Left Unity - understandable, given the CPGB has decided to participate in the new party. So I welcome the attention on what may be, in the short run, a much more significant entity in terms of its geographic spread and influence within the working class movement. In the North East, for example, there are more active People’s Assembly groups than branches of LU. I’m not suggesting that the two organisations are comparable in terms of their function, but that LU will struggle to incorporate comrades from existing electoral parties. The breadth of the PA is both its strength and its potential weakness, which is why I hope the CPGB will be fully engaged in the debate on the PA’s structure and strategy. The Teesside PA was launched due to the initiative of one comrade, who called for a meeting of activists from the area straight after the North East People’s Assembly in Newcastle last year. My view of the PA is that it was badly needed years ago, but organisations like the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party, which have influence within the major unions, were unwilling or unable to establish a united anti-austerity organisation. So, although the PA is late, it is still needed - and I hope that the SP and SWP will remain involved. Certainly, at a local level, activists from all the different socialist/communist organisations participate in the PA, and this can and does overlap with membership of different trades unions supportive of the PA at a national level. It’s a shame that the motion we sent to conference on the subject of economic democracy, cited in Peter’s article, was not discussed or voted on directly - I wrote the first draft and it was greatly improved by clarifying amendments from two comrades. In addition to the debate at the PA meeting, I led off a discussion on economic democracy at a ‘general assembly’ of the Teesside Solidarity Movement, an activist network which is mostly sceptical of the People’s Assembly’s potential. Certainly, in Teesside PA we haven’t shied away from controversy and have had comradely debates on the strategy for defeating austerity, what Grangemouth means for our movement and our clearly differing views on whom to back in elections. This openness has not prevented effective solidarity action: it has allowed it to take place. James Doran Darlington Sensitive Jack Conrad writes that “it is clear” that I, like the CPGB, oppose age-of-consent laws, and goes on to reformulate my proposal as a system of positive proof of consent when the partners in a relationship straddle the age of 16 (Letters, March 20). This is really a matter of how to formulate the idea I am advocating. Jack’s idea seems thoroughly compatible with mine in reality, but obviously both my position and his formulation of it as ‘positive proof’ depends on some sort of age threshold to hang it around; otherwise the idea does not work. Whether this should be called an ‘age of consent’, or some other term that sounds less forbidding (but sufficiently so not to be ignored), is a question that requires some consideration. But Jack is right about the principle that people who are close in age but on either side of the ‘line’ (whatever you call it) should not face prosecution for obviously consensual sex, and even in cases with a greater age difference, provided consent can be proven, there should be no crime involved. We are agreed on the principle, I think - precise formulation of it needs care, as this is a sensitive subject. Ian Donovan email Fear not Having spent many years thinking and occasionally writing about gender and sexuality from a Marxist standpoint, I’m gratified that the CPGB takes this aspect of capitalist society seriously and, particularly at this time, the important questions lurking under the label, ‘age of consent’. I must take issue with Vernon Jacks, however, when he says that it is impossible to debate this publicly because of state repression (Letters, March 20). The same reasons could be cited for not discussing proletarian revolution. However, a development of our theory is needed if we are to escape a purely liberal problematic. As a pointer in this direction, why has the notion of ‘paedophilia’ become so overwhelming in recent years, displacing ‘homosexuality’as the dominant policing concept of sexuality? The answer must lie in the changing form of family: perhaps ‘homosexuality’ corresponded to the hegemony of the nuclear family (having itself displaced earlier notions such as ‘fornication’ and ‘sodomy’), while ‘paedophilia’ fits the needs of a society in which marriage has significantly eroded, so that responsibility for children falls more firmly back on the mother in a context of commercialised sexuality. The recent Daily Mail campaign against Harriet Harman and others has highlighted the utopianism of attempting a rational reform of sexuality while capitalism rules supreme. But let us not be afraid of developing our critique of the current repressive order and our ideas on the general direction in which sexual relations might develop in a communist society. David Fernbach email Sex crime Ian Donovan (Letters, March 6) is surprised at my “focusing on one narrow aspect” of the debate on ages of consent. But I wasn’t writing a major article on the issue; I was simply submitting a letter, where it is normal to confine oneself to one or two subjects (February 27). Turning to the actual subject, I am not convinced, as Jack Conrad is, that Ian is arguing for abolition of the age of consent. Clearly (to me anyway), not only is he arguing for an age of consent, but in favour of the age of consent, as understood by the British state. Why, for example, should a person of 17 having sex with a willing and consensual partner of 15 be subject to proof of consent if nobody in the relationship has any complaint or accusation that consent wasn’t given? Why should a fellow 15-year-old not require such written or validated proof of consent? The proposition is nonsense. Jack’s legal draftsmanship is equally nonsensical. He suggests university tutors should be sacked for consensual relationships with their students. Given that, typically, a student will be 19 or 20 before starting a university course and they have enough gumption to get into university, one would expect they will know with whom they want to have sex. These are not patients in a mental hospital or old folk in a care home subject to the power of their care staff, but adults. The fact that a tutor is in a position of authority is irrelevant. As a number of people have now said, if someone feels pressured or coerced into sex against their wishes, this is not consent, and normal rules of sexual abuse and rape apply. We are talking here only of voluntary and consensual relationships. The idea that sexual partners should fill out an ‘exemption from prosecution’ form, apart from being a real passion-killer, is totally inapplicable to most spontaneous and casual sexual encounters - or will we also require a period of courtship and references before engaging in sex? Why presume it is the older person in the relationship making the advances anyway? I have very happy memories of making all the running with a middle-aged blonde bombshell in my very early teenage years. Did she take advantage of me? Ha, you’re having a laugh. I know I wasn’t unusual and, although things are now shrouded by the legal sword of Damocles and being whisked away into involuntary detention of the laughably named ‘care system’, I am sure young teenagers of either sex still think like that. I am sorry Tony Rees had such bad early sexual experiences (Letters, March 20), but, to be honest, his bad experience was really down to his own confused state and insecurity, rather than being some helpless child with whom some creepy old professor had his wicked way. Abuse and exploitation happens among adults, and Tony’s problem falls into that category. Why should a person of any age having sex with a 15-year-old in Britain be subject to the most tyrannical penalties, when no other country in Europe would impose them? The CPGB sees itself as a party of the European Union, but wants to defend a peculiarly British age of consent. Why? Because British teenagers are less aware of their bodies or have some mental defect which prevents them understanding what sex is and what consent is while their continental peers do? Many countries around the world fix their age of consent at 12 and the sky doesn’t fall in. As far as I know, nobody is particularly subject to “being coaxed” into things they don’t want to do, as Ian suggests. The odd thing is, in countries with the lowest age of consent, less young people actually do have sex than in countries where it is older. Could it be that the moralist obsession with child and teenage sexuality in Britain engenders a more precocious exposure to it? I think your earlier position on abolition of the age of consent, while strengthening laws and culture which outlaw actual abuse and rape, is clearer than Ian’s confused proposition, which I am sure is prompted by the highest motives. I do not want anyone to get the impression that I am not interested in that either - the neglect and abuse of children breaks my heart. I simply consider the age of consent actually contributes to that. I remember when my own daughters reached puberty and debated with me going on the pill. I assured them they had to make the decisions and choices they were comfortable with. Truth be known, I, like many dads, would never be happy with them having sex with some bloke, whatever age he was, because, apart from believing none of them were good enough, and nobody would love and care for them more than I did, I guess I wanted them to stay little children. But life in the real world isn’t like that and sex is a normal and natural part of life. Young people need to be able to choose whether to engage in sex or not free of any legal or social pressure. Don Browning email Pan fight Responding to Dave Vincent’s letter of March 13, I think we can definitely say what Karl Marx’s views on immigration controls would have been. His programme was for the abolition of nation-states and the international unity of the workers. He saw with his own eyes the effects on the British working class of mass Irish immigration and argued for their incorporation into the working class, not their exclusion. His analysis of capital was that it always creates a reserve army of labour, constantly pushing workers out of jobs and pulling workers into exploitative labour relations. Ireland is a good example, losing a third of its population. Living standards went down for the masses because the reserve army of labour was maintained, so profits went up. Capital cannot serve the interests of the working class. Successful resistance to capitalism makes it malfunction. Unemployed workers in Britain now have benefits, meaning that they can choose not to be part of the reserve army of labour. But the campaign for immigration controls will turn out to be a campaign to attack benefits and restore capital to rude health. It is not enough to reform capitalism; that only makes it malfunction. We have to replace it with the economy of the working class: an international task. I have found a Lenin quote, from 1915, in a letter to the Socialist Propaganda League in the USA: “In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingosocialism’, we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the SP in America, who are in favour of restrictions of the immigration of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907, and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and be at the same time in favour of such restrictions. And we assert that socialists in America, especially English socialists, belonging to the ruling, and oppressing nation, who are BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX l 020 7241 1756 l www.cpgb.org.uk l [email protected] 3 worker 1003 March 27 2014 weekly not against any restrictions of immigration, against the possession of colonies …, that such socialists are in reality jingoes” (www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/ nov/09.htm). Dave asks if aboriginals have any rights. Not according to capitalism. Rights are a question of power, not morality. Aboriginals need the overthrow of capitalism for their interests to be properly addressed. It is a task for communism to create a society fit for all human beings. I agree with John Smithee (Letters, March 13) that there is a very real problem, but there is no short-term or easy solution, especially because the unions are so weak at present. Capitalism has a long record of getting round immigration controls and, when they can’t, they take the jobs to where the cheap labour is. We need a pan-European fight for full employment, with equalisation of living standards up to the level of genuine subsistance. Phil Kent Haringey various trades councils, who were more representative of workers. A decade later, London Trades Council reversed its position. The Jews formed their own unions as part of this process. Some 50% of Phil Piratin’s voters, who successfully elected him as the Communist Party candidate for Mile End constituency, were Jewish. It was a radicalism born of the fight against fascism, immigration controls and other capitalist evils. There was no contradiction between the interests of the “indigenous” working class and the Jewish working class. Vincent’s chauvinist and racist letter is premised on the idea that the world’s poor are just waiting to come to Britain. He talks of immigrant workers as ‘outsiders’. Clearly, the unity of the working class takes second place to cross-class alliances. He seeks a capitalism which is benevolent to ‘indigenous’ workers and allows the capitalists to play divide and rule. Tony Greenstein Brighton However he spins it, Dave Vincent is a social chauvinist with his call for immigration controls. He doubts that Marx would have supported open borders, but there isn’t a hint in his writings or actions to the contrary. I cannot detect any support for immigration controls in the famous Communist manifesto, which declares: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Nor in Yitzhak Laor’s formulation: “The nation that oppresses another nation forges its own chains.” Marx was opposed to anything dividing the working class. He was hardly likely to have appealed to the bourgeoisie for support for immigration controls! Eleanor Marx was a vociferous campaigner against the 1905 Aliens Act. Dave Vincent points to sections of the bourgeoisie who oppose immigration controls because wages are lower for immigrants. He omits to mention that the capitalist class collectively, through the Tory Party, has always supported immigration controls. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed that his position is also that of the UK Independence Party and the far right. The right is motivated not just by immediate economic gain, but by the prospect of appealing to ‘native’ workers on a nationalist basis. Vincent refers to “indigenous labour”. I wonder if that includes me, since my grandparents came to Britain in 1912. In an imperialist country, this is, by definition, a racist concept. The settler working class in most of the white dominions - Canada, Australia, South Africa, etc - opposed the immigration of black and Asian labour. Vincent asks whether native Americans, Aborigines and Palestinians should accept “free movement of people”. This is a false analogy. Immigrants to Britain don’t, despite fascist propaganda, come with the aim of colonisation and dispossession of those already here. They are looking for work or fleeing the consequence of imperialist wars. The immigration of Jews to Palestine or whites to the United States was with the specific and declared aim of colonising - ie, stealing the land from those already living there and transferring or enslaving the indigenous population. Vincent skirts round the Aliens Act by asking a totally fatuous question as to what the Bolsheviks would have done during a period of war. Clearly, when you are fighting 20 capitalist countries using spies and subversion where possible, one may not practise open borders. This is entirely different from civil society. To remind him, the 1905 Aliens Act was brought in by the Tories under Arthur James Balfour, who was also a devout Christian and Zionist supporter. But the Jewish workers of the East End did what successive waves of immigrants have done. They organised and showed British labour the way ahead. That was why the TUC congress decision of 1882 to support the introduction of immigration controls was subsequently opposed by I am surprised by John Smithee’s reasoning (Letters, March 13), which is presumably socialist in motivation: a socialist society has a right to implement immigration controls, since managing labour resources is no different from the management of any other resource in a rational and planned economy. We concede no such right to capitalism, because the control of immigration is a control on labour, which in turn is part of the exploitation and subjugation of the working class. The influx of cheap European labour has not depressed UK wages: UK capitalism has. In any case, Smithee’s is a peculiarly nationalist way of looking at things, which has little to do with either Marxism or capitalism. Quite apart from Marx’s internationalism (“Workers of the world”), Lenin’s theoretical revolution makes it abundantly clear that in the epoch of imperialism there is no such thing as a national working class. This is not just an idea in Lenin’s head: it is also reality. Today, the working class and the reserve army of labour are international realities, just like capital flows. Of course, anyone is free to continue to see things from the point of view of market-town parochialism. But there are consequences. You start by defending national borders against the incoming tide of cheap labour, motivated by the purest of socialist principles, and one day you find yourself patriotically supporting your country’s right to defend its front lines in some far-off country. Something to meditate, as August 4 approaches. Susil Gupta email Chauvinist Meditate Unquestioningly Commenting on comrade Mike Macnair’s article on Left Unity two weeks ago (‘Indecision and irrationality’, March 13), there is one glaring activity not considered at all. Why has the author put forward only a dichotomy between electoral activity on one side and strikes and protests on the other? Why has he given the impression that formulating and proposing long-term policies for society-wide action is tied at the hip to electoral activity? Surely, a more reliable means of obtaining political support would entail membership recruitment campaigns based on unambiguously thorough political education? What about party members who ironically do not wish to cast a ballot for their own party, based on healthy scepticism towards the electoral system as a whole? What about ballot spoilage campaigns? On a European note, the only reliable organisational measure to avoid being wedded to the “dominant nationalism” of the British left is for Left Unity to affiliate unquestioningly with the European United Left-Nordic Green Left. Jacob Richter email Misogynistic Mark Adams brings up a straw man in his January 30 letter. He quotes Marx, who said of Georg Daumer: “… modern natural science ... has revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man’s childish attitude towards nature ... it would be desirable that Bavaria’s sluggish peasant economy, the ground on which grow priests and Daumers alike, should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines” (K Marx CW Vol 10, pp241-46). Marx appears to characterise Daumer as some modern-day, sandal-wearing, long-haired hippy. Later in the review that Adams quotes, Daumer says: “Nature and woman are the really divine, as distinct from the human and man .... The sacrifice of the human to the natural, of the male to the female, is the genuine, the only true meekness and self-externalisation, the highest - nay, the only - virtue and piety.” Marx in his reply comes across as misogynistic and anti-environmentalist. I doubt that by the time Marx encountered Lewis Morgan’s anthropology he would have remembered Daumer. But Daumer’s words should give us pause for thought about the contribution of anthropology and our relationship to the environment. The key insight of Engels’ The origin of the family, private property and the state, was that early human kinship was matrilineal. Our knowledge and understanding about early and extant hunter-gatherers has vastly improved. Now this is not to stay that we can go back to some “stupid rustic idyll”, as Marx says, but we can now understand what it means to look through hunter-gatherer eyes into this world. Adams is not too subtle when he uses phrases such as “irrationalist hogwash” and “manipulation” in terms of our “future” mastery of the environment. It was as if we had not already learned to master nature, but perhaps we have forgotten in modernism’s rush to overturn tradition. For, if any group of people have got a command of nature, surely it is those hunter-gatherers which the 1850 Marx wants to bury. Extant hunter-gatherers have no or little accumulation of food. They live in a world of abundance and as such they have confidence that the environment will provide for them. We moderns don’t have such confidence. We live in a world of scarcity, where brokers gamble on food supplies and thousands die of hunger every day. Who has the better mastery of nature? We should have a little more reverence and humility for the environment. The current trajectory of capitalism is unsustainable. There is a lot we know and a lot we don’t, but we do not necessarily need machines to command nature. Simon Wells London CPGB podcasts While I can certainly appreciate the positive sentiments behind Mike Hunt’s poem, I did find it a bit lightweight (Letters, March 20). If we really want to deal with the curse of reformism in poetical terms, then we must toughen up! I am big fan of Aragon and I always loved his line, “Shoot the trained bears of social democracy”. Lately I’ve been trying to put myself in Aragon’s shoes to figure out how he would deal with today’s fake-left charlatans. I’ve worked out a whole load of what I call ‘SPEW sonnets’, which is a play on the Weekly Worker’s own amusing acronym of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. I don’t think your readers are ready for all 300-plus lines, but here’s a quick snip: Comrades, I’m down and feeling blue My politics are all covered in SPEW But, oh! Epiphany! A Marxist sponge with a bit of bleach on it Is a pretty good way to clean up vomit. Lloyd Dowry Hull Searchlight 50 years on Sick Every Monday we upload a podcast commenting on the current political situation. In addition, the site features voice files of public meetings and other events: http://cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts. London Communist Forum Sunday March 30, 5pm: Weekly political report from CPGB Provisional Central Committee, followed by open discussion and Capital reading group. Calthorpe Arms, 252 Grays Inn Road, London WC1. This meeting: Vol 1, cVol 1, chapter 28, ‘Bloody legislation against the expropriated’. Organised by CPGB: www.cpgb.org.uk. Radical Anthropology Group Introduction to anthropology: the science of mythology Tuesday April 1, 6.15pm: ‘The trickster: core of hunter-gatherer religion’. Speaker: Camilla Power. 88 Fleet Street, London EC4 (next to St Bride’s church, 5 minutes walk from Blackfriars tube). Admission free, but donations appreciated. Organised by Radical Anthropology Group: www.radicalanthropologygroup.org. Left Unity conference Saturday March 29, 11am to 6pm (registration from 10am): National policy conference, Museum of Science and Industry, Liverpool Road, Castlefield, Manchester M3. Registration: leftunity. org/manchester-conference-information-saturday-29th-march-2014. Organised by Left Unity: www.leftunity.org. Welsh Labour Grassroots Saturday March 29, 6pm: Meeting at Welsh Labour conference, Somerset Hotel, Llandudno. Organised by Welsh Labour Grassroots:http://welshlabourgrassroots.org. Young People against Austerity Saturday March 29, 9.30am to 12.30pm: Workshop discussions, Sunderland Minster, High Street West, Sunderland SR1. Organised by Young People Against Austerity: www.facebook.com/events/555758351172393. Stop the racists and fascists Saturday March 29, 1.30pm: Demonstration, St Mark’s Road, Sunderland SR4. Organised by North East Anti-Fascists: www.antifascistnetwork.wordpress.com. Hands Off Venezuela Monday March 31, 7pm: Debate: ‘What is really happening in Venezuela?’ Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way, London W1. Speaker: journalist Ewan Robertson. Organised by Hands Off Venezuela: www.handsoffvenezuela.org. No to Atos Tuesday April 1, 9.30am: Demonstration against work capability assessments, Atos assessment centre, Elvet House, Hallgarth Street, Durham DH1. Organised by Durham Community Support Centre: www.facebook.com/events/486966548091880. Education under occupation Tuesday April 1, 6.30pm: Stories from West Bank and Gaza students. P21 Gallery, 21 Chalton Street, London NW1. Organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign: www.palestinecampaign.org. How should we remember World War I? Thursday April 3, 7pm: Anti-militarist debate, St James church, 197 Piccadilly, London W1. Speakers: Julian Brazier MP; John Blake (editor of Labour Teachers); Lindsey German (Stop the War Coalition);Jeremy Corbyn MP. Organised by Stop the War Coalition: www.stopwar.org.uk. Under Israeli occupation Thursday April 3, 7.30pm: Public meeting, Friends Meeting House, 2 York Street, Bath. Speaker: Raed Debiy. Organised by Labour2Palestine: www.labour2palestine.com. Campaigning for Palestine Saturday April 5, 10am to 3.30pm: Trade union conference, TUC, Congress House, 23-28 Great Russell Street, London WC1. Delegate registration essential: www.palestinecampaign.org/trade-union-conference. Organised by Palestine Solidarity Campaign: www.palestinecampaign.org. Monday April 7, 10.30am to 5.30pm; Tuesday April 8, 9.30am to 5.30pm: Conference, University of Northampton, Park Campus, Boughton Green Road, Northampton. 50th anniversary of Searchlight magazine. Organised by Searchlight: [email protected]. Palestine solidarity Saturday April 12, 2.30pm to 5pm: Brighton and Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign AGM, Community Base, Queens Road, Brighton. Organised by Palestine Solidarity Campaign: www.palestinecampaign.org. Queer free thinking Saturday April 12, 12 noon till late: Discussion, performance and exhibition, Ron Todd House, 33-37 Moreland Street, London EC1. Organised by Unite London and Eastern Region LGBT Committee: 020 8800 4281. The future of Occupy Sunday April 13, 12 noon: Meeting, Common House, Bethnal Green, London E2. Organised by Occupy London: http://occupylondon.org.uk. CPGB wills Remember the CPGB and keep the struggle going. Put our party’s name and address, together with the amount you wish to leave, in your will. If you need further help, do not hesitate to contact us. 4 March 27 2014 1003 worker weekly POWER POLITICS West’s wounded imperial pride Eddie Ford calls for opposition to the escalating campaign for sanctions against Russia and to ‘nonlethal’ military assistance to Ukraine T ensions are still very high following the ‘illegal’ referendum in Crimea, which seemingly saw a large majority vote for merger with Russia. Western leaders and some antiRussian left groups insist that we have witnessed an “annexation”, despite the obvious fact that there was popular enthusiasm for union with Russia and there is absolutely no evidence that recent events in Crimea were the result of a carefully planned plot by Vladimir Putin - rather, he saw an opportunity open up and did not hesitate to take swift and ruthless advantage. Ukraine announced its intention to pull its forces out of Crimea on March 24. Their departure comes after Russian forces seized naval facilities at Feodosia, the last Crimean military base under Kiev’s control. In a highly symbolic gesture, the Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, met troops in Crimea and went on a tour of military bases - we are now in control. He also appointed Denys Berezovsky the former head of Ukraine’s navy and one of the few officers to switch allegiances before the referendum - as deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Reward for a job well done. On March 24, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, held preliminary talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Deshchytsya, during a nuclear security summit in the Hague - their first direct meeting since the crisis began. Lavrov also met John Kerry, the United States secretary of state, who expressed “strong concern” about the “massing” of Russian forces on Ukraine’s borders - were they poised to invade? After the meeting, Lavrov declared that Russia had laid out its plan to establish “good national dialogue” with “all” the residents of Ukraine and insouciantly mentioned that it would be “no great tragedy” if Moscow was expelled from the G8, as threatened by the US and EU. After all, he added, Russia is “not clinging to that format” - the rules of the game are changing. Thus, as things stand right now, a military confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian forces is not on the cards. However, the danger of a serious escalation remains very real the main threat coming from belligerent western leaders out to repair wounded imperial pride. Looking at Crimea, a common imperialist complaint is that Russia is set on “redesigning” the postSoviet Union world order - a clearly unacceptable notion to the imperialists. Something must be done, but what? Resurgent One thing that might be done is to say goodbye to the ‘peace dividend’ that was apparently reaped by the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is, cuts to the army should be stopped - perhaps even reversed - and the dust should be shaken off the west’s nuclear arsenal. General Philip Breedlove, Nato’s supreme commander, declared on March 23 that Russia had assembled a “very, very sizeable and very, very ready” force on Ukraine’s eastern border that could be planning to head for Transnistria (or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic). A Russianspeaking enclave located mostly on a strip of land between the River Dniester and the eastern Moldovan border with Ukraine, it declared independence from Moldova in 1990 and two years later fought a very brief war with that state. As part of the July 1992 ceasefire, a joint control commission, comprising Russia, Moldova and Transnistria, supervises the security arrangements in the demilitarised zone. Needless to say, Nato: threatening both military and diplomatic action Transnistria is not recognised by any state in the world - except Moscow, of course. Anyhow, Breedlove described these Russian manoeuvres as “very worrisome” - indications of a possible rapid incursion into Transnistria - he claimed that some of the elements of the Crimea scenario are also present in the breakaway republic (last week the speaker of Transnistria’s parliament urged Russia to “incorporate” the region). More generally, he argued, Russia appeared to be using the so-called “frozen conflicts” in neighbouring territories like Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh as a “tool” to stop them ever becoming part of the EU or Nato. In which case, according to general Breedlove, Nato needs to rethink the “positioning and readiness” of its forces in eastern Europe so they can counter - and repel - any moves by Moscow. Similarly, the former UK general, Richard Dannatt, has stated his view in The Daily Telegraph that Britain should cancel army cuts as “a message” to a “resurgent” Russia - therefore a newly formed brigade of 3,000 soldiers should be deployed to Germany (March 23). For him, the recent crises in Syria and Ukraine meant the international landscape was more “challenging” than when the coalition government came to power in 2010 therefore this is a “poor moment” for the west to be “weak in resolve and muscle”. The government is cutting the regular army from 102,000 to 82,000 by 2020 and intends to withdraw all 20,000 British troops from their bases in Germany, ending the 70year military presence. But Dannatt wants the government to declare that “greater military capability” must underpin its diplomacy. Jaw-jaw is no good without the threat of war-war. Indeed, resorting to a clapped-out historical cliché, he writes that there are “uncomfortable shadows of the 30s” - meaning imperialism needs to start tooling up again. Unfortunately for Dannatt, the prime minister has rejected his suggestion. However, David Cameron has said that the British army will help “beef up” Nato defences in the Baltic republics - all of which, of course, have substantial Russian minorities. In a further show of support, David Lidington, the Europe minister, embarked on a two-day visit to Latvia and Lithuania to “underline our commitment” to those countries. Furthermore, Cameron reminded Russia of Britain’s support for the “collective defence principle” of Nato - article 5 of the treaty stating that an armed attack against one member is an attack against all. So there has been aggressive rhetoric - especially from the US, dissatisfied with the response from some European capitals. In an interview published ahead of his arrival at the security summit, Barack Obama said that Putin needed to “understand the economic and political consequences” of his actions in Ukraine - though he did not believe, naturally, that the country should be viewed as a “battleground” between the east and the west, as that kind of thinking “should have ended with the cold war”. What a hypocrite. Now, Obama talks of “broad sanctions” against Russia if it makes any attempt to move its troops beyond Crimea and into eastern or western Ukraine. The US would be “ready and willing”, to target energy, arms, financial services and trade - even if that had an adverse effect on the world economy. Europe, especially Germany, has close economic ties to Russia being particularly dependent on it for its energy requirements. So the desire to take punitive action against Russia has been tempered by caution over the potential knock-on effects. More to the point, Angela Merkel is not exactly excited by the prospect of Berlin going very cold in the winter if Moscow turns off the tap. Not very convincingly though, Obama has vowed that the economic impact on Russia would be “far worse” - yeah, sure. So far, the US and EU have responded with a series of sanctions targeting those individuals, including senior officials (“Putin’s cronies”), whom they accuse of involvement in Crimea’s “annexation”. Hence the US has imposed sanctions on 31 people in a campaign crafted to target Russian officials with close links to Putin, but without damaging US businesses - a tricky act to pull off. At the end of the nuclear security conference, Obama called Russia a mere “regional power” that would always struggle to compete with America’s global influence - the US being the “most powerful nation in the world” and the one other countries looked to for a lead on global crises, such as the conflict in Syria. We are the global super-cop and that is the way it will remain. Meanwhile, on March 21 White House officials revealed that the Pentagon was providing “non-lethal” assistance to the Ukrainian military - presumably just as they did to the anti-Assad opposition in Syria. Lesser evil Communists unequivocally oppose the pro-sanctions campaign mounted by the west and the attempts to more or less demonise the Russian authorities - making out that its “expansionism” is the central cause of the conflict. This is clearly nonsense. At the very least, the western-backed orangebrown ‘revolution’ in Kiev and a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism are equally to blame. A nationalism that by definition is virulently anti-Russian and to a certain extent coloured - or shit-stained - by anti-Semitism. Though it should hardly have to be said, being the ‘A’ of Marxism - never mind about the B or C - alas we find that we have to remind some comrades of an irreducible maxim - communists are implacable foes of nationalism and national chauvinism. Therefore, we in the CPGB condemn the noxious, proimperialist stance of the increasingly Russophobic Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, last week’s Solidarity proudly proclaiming that the AWL is for the “Ukrainian armed forces” in any “fight against Russian domination” (March 17). Straight into the first camp without passing ‘go’. Not that Socialist Resistance is much better. Ridiculously, the comrades inform us that “socialist participants” in the antiYanukovych/Maidan demonstrations - such as Ilya Budraitksis of Vpered (Forward), Russian section of the Fourth International - saw the mass movement as “containing the germs of a revolutionary process” . More fool them - worshipping spontaneity always leads to a fall. We are then stupidly told that Crimea is “roughly analogous” to the north of Ireland - ie, has a settler population that displaced the original inhabitants and denied them the right to a state. Thus, Putin is using the ethnic Russian population in Crimea in the same sort of way as the British state has “used the presence of a Protestant population which is opposed to a united Ireland to claim sovereignty over Irish territory”. In other words, the Russian population of Crimea have no right to self-determination, as presumably they are an ‘oppressor’ people. Woefully, SR goes on to argue that Russia “stage-managed a flagrantly ridiculous referendum” and “used the result to seize Crimea” - which makes Russia “the aggressor”, as it “violated Ukraine’s national sovereignty”.1 It is interesting, isn’t it, that these two groups - both of them involved in Left Unity, as it happens - repeat so closely the phrases of the imperialists? However, it goes without saying that we equally oppose pro-Putin apologetics - the idea being that, because Ukraine is so infested by fascists and Nazis, as we are constantly told by Russia Today, then we have to support Russia as the ‘lesser of two evils’. A pitiful position. But one manifested by Socialist Action, another group that has members in LU. On its not particularly dynamic website we find an article dated March 4 that is the reverse image of the AWL. Whilst correctly noting that the EU’s plans are to “subordinate” the economy of Ukraine such as it is - to the “interests of western European capital” and that the US hopes to “integrate” it into Nato, it then proceeds to slip into a vicarious Russian nationalism. First by telling us that not only the right to self-determination of “all the regions” in Ukraine should be “defended”, but so too should “any assistance that Russia extends to ensuring that”. In fact, that means “defending the right of the Russian army to come to the aid of the eastern regions to prevent Kiev enforcing its control”.2 A recipe for nationalist civil war, with the AWL and SR cheering on one side, and SA the other. Even worse, if anything, is the extraordinarily superficial analysis proffered by Eamonn McCann in the Irish Times on March 20 and faithfully reprinted on the perhaps misnamed Stop the War Coalition website on March 23. 3 A prominent member of United Left Alliance and long associated with the Socialist Workers Party, he really should know better then again, maybe not. His starting point is generally sound - “Neither Washington nor Moscow has had genuine concern for the interests of any section of the Ukrainian people, but have been engaged in an exercise of self-interested great power politics”. But it deteriorates quickly from there. Though comrade McCann admits that Putin has been busy “manipulating fears” and “stoking tensions” for strategic advantage, he disastrously concludes that, though it “might be a close run thing”, in this instance Russia has “more right” on its side than the west - which for the comrade is the “same thing as saying, more simply, that Putin and Russia are right”. Thus the truly crass, and quite shameful, headline to the article: “In the game of great power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea, let it be Russia”. All these comrades demonstrate where the ‘lesser of two evils’ approach to politics takes you - the total abandonment of working class independence. Instead, we say: Neither Kiev and its western backers nor Moscow and the government of Vladimir Putin. For the international working class l [email protected] Notes 1. March 24 (http://socialistresistance.org/6085/ ukraine-the-russians-are-the-aggressors). 2. www.socialistaction.net/International/Europe/ Ukraine/After-the-coup-let-Ukraines-regionsdetermine-their-future.html. 3. http://stopwar.org.uk/news/if-we-have-to-picka-side-over-crimea-let-it-be-russia#.UywRTIXUcwL. 5 worker 1003 March 27 2014 weekly ULU The new moral panic Charles Gradnitzer looks at the most recent move to further ostracise the SWP Self-appointed arbiters O Regarding-Marxism-Festival-2014-and-theSocialist-Workers-Party. 2. www.workersliberty.org/story/2014/03/19/ defend-free-debate-campuses. 3. www.nusconnect.org.uk/news/article/womens/ National-Womans-Conference-2014-Day-2. 4. www.swp.org.uk/press/response-statement-ulu13-march-2014. 5. www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/249/47. 6. See ‘Autonomists in “feelgood” attack on SWP’ Weekly Worker December 19 2013. 7. The Guardian December 6 2010. 8. www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/ russian-revolution/ch06.htm. Communist University 2014 Saturday August 16 to Saturday August 23 inclusive Goldsmiths University Surrey House, 80 Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6PB Full week, with accommodation: £200 (£250 solidarity, £110 concessions) Full week, no accommodation: £60 (£30 concessions) First weekend (one night’s accommodation): £40 (£25) One day: £10 (£5). One session: £5 (£2.50) New Cross New Cross Gate Surrey House 80 Lewishham Way ha sh m ay W Nothing new here, of course - it has often been the case that freedom of the press, speech and assembly have been curtailed on the grounds of protecting the public from harm. The argument here bears a striking resemblance to that put forward in 1919 by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the US supreme court when he upheld the conviction of socialists Charles Schneck and Elizabeth Baer for distributing antiwar literature. In his statement he argued that it was right to prevent freedom of speech on the grounds that allowing the Socialist Party to agitate against World War I posed a “clear and present danger”, in that it would bring about “evils” that Congress had a right to prevent.5 To my knowledge nobody has ever claimed they have been sexually assaulted at Marxism or any other SWP public event. Rather, as is the absolute norm, sexual assault occurs in private circumstances and where the man is known to the victim. But, by presenting their decision as a matter of women’s safety, the ULU guardians of morality are attempting to protect themselves from criticism: you are either ‘with us’ or you are a ‘rape apologist’. The result is that the very people who defend the turning over of SWP stalls, setting fire to copies of Socialist Worker and tearing down SWP posters6 are now demanding a ‘safe space’ for themselves. Furthermore, this selective application of the ‘safe spaces’ policy serves to demonstrate that the ban has little to do with making campuses safer for anybody. In December 2010 the NUS leadership actively campaigned against the 30,000-strong demonstration organised by National Campaign Against Notes 1. www.ulu.co.uk/news/article/6013/Statement- wi left in awe at the amount of cognitive dissonance the author must have had to endure in order to produce it. Of course, nobody expected SWP leaders to hold their hands up and admit that they nearly destroyed their own organisation in order to cover up allegations of rape made against their national secretary. It was, after all, the very bureaucratic centralism that produced the crisis in the first place that still prevents them from admitting any wrongdoing or even acknowledging many of their other wrongdoings over the past three years. Having said that, however, the statement produced by ULU is simply wrong, both in terms of the arguments it makes and the conclusions it draws. The first argument is that the SWP is a gang of victim-blaming rape apologists and that in order to support young women on campus the SWP must be prevented from speaking there. The sabbatical officers at ULU presumably believe, having won a student union election on the back of a 2% turnout, that they have been appointed arbiters of what is and is not acceptable to say, to determine in advance the harmful consequences of allowing the SWP to speak on campus, and relieve us of the responsibility of deciding for ourselves what we might not want to hear. As abhorrent as the SWP’s defence of Martin Smith has been, we are all grown-up enough to make that decision. The second argument is that the SWP should be kept off campus ostensibly on the grounds of protecting students from sexual harassment and violence - freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are collateral damage. of the SWP, yet still oppose the ULU ban, to see that this deference to personal experience mysteriously vanishes as soon as it comes into conflict with their conclusions. However, this hypocrisy is rarely pointed out simply because most people do not assert political or moral authority over others on the basis of their experience or identity. Socialists must fight for the freedom of assembly, association and speech on a consistent and principled basis. These rights are not special privileges only to be afforded to ideas and organisations we can tolerate; they are not privileges that can be denied through the infallible clairvoyance of the benevolent NUS bureaucracy. We champion these rights in our own interest - we need them in order to agitate for our own ideas. If we think that somebody is a rape apologist or an organisation is institutionally sexist, then it is our right to argue that and to convince others. But it is not our right to pre-empt the decision of others and prevent them from coming to their own conclusions. By doing this we make not just ourselves, but everybody else, a prisoner of our own narcissism. These rights are important because they allow us to sharpen our arguments, clarify ideas and arrive at the truth. Nobody has the right to determine which subjects are acceptable to discuss. To allow such a thing to happen is to hand over the ability to think and to make decisions for yourself to a stale bureaucracy. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg observes in Zur russischen Revolution, “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element”8 l Le n March 11 a statement announcing that the Socialist Workers Party had been banned from holding its annual Marxism event at University College London by the University of London Union was posted on Facebook. It was signed by five ULU sabbatical officers, with many student activists adding their names in support. It was then subsequently published on the student union website1 - after a vote on the ULU executive, where six officers were in favour, two voted against and one abstained. After the statement was published, the initial five sabbaticals were joined by a further three - including ULU president Michael Chessum, who had been accused of trying to overturn the decision and ignoring the various attempts of the ULU women’s officer to contact him. One notable absence from the list of signatories is the ULU vicepresident and member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Dan Cooper. While Cooper seems reluctant to state his position regarding this decision, the AWL has produced a reasonable statement opposing the ban on Marxism.2 At the National Union of Students women’s conference on March 19, the person who spearheaded the ban, Susuana Antubam, was elected national women’s officer of the NUS on an intersectional-feminist platform, narrowly beating the Labour Studentsbacked candidate,3 and was pleased to announce that she had “annoyed” the SWP in her hustings speech. In an unprecedented move the SWP responded with a statement of its own.4 This statement is a flat-out denial of matters of public record and one is Fees and Cuts, preferring instead to hold a poorly attended candlelit vigil, on the grounds that the demonstration would be unsafe.7 Today some of the very same people who organised that demonstration in the face of massive police repression and violence are now signing a statement justifying the banning of an event on the grounds it is unsafe. We arrive then at the third and final argument: the SWP is simply not worth it. Having looked into their crystal ball and determined that the SWP cannot be won round to intersectional, feminist politics, the sabbatical officers have declared that they are out of reach of any sort of “progressive debate” and therefore have no right to use ULU facilities. It may be true that die-hard SWP loyalists like Rhetta Moran need deprogramming rather than debating, but no-one in the SWP ought to be regarded as being beyond persuasion. And what about those on the periphery - including new members or contacts - who have not been involved in the factional struggles of the past three years? It is important to fight against this culture of anathematisation among the left - a culture that, ironically, the SWP itself has promoted and encouraged in the past. When the subject has been broached on the internet, a common argument has been that to oppose the ban on the Marxism festival is to contradict or deny the ‘autonomous decision of an oppressed group’. The idea that a statement signed by 80-odd people representing less than one percent of ULU’s student population, a third of them men and a quarter of them studying at universities in Scotland or Birmingham, represents the ‘autonomous’ will of women at ULU is absurd. This is a political statement from people who subscribe to particular variety of bureaucratic feminist politics - a politics that claims that one’s identity makes one beyond challenge. Either the knowledge and historical memory of oppression has no objective basis and can only be derived from personal experience - in which case the rest of us are left with no frame of reference, should intra- or inter-group conflict arise; or we can learn from collective experience, which can be analysed and discussed by everybody. Indeed one need only look at the response of intersectional feminists to those who have themselves suffered at the hands 6 March 27 2014 1003 worker weekly LEFT UNITY How to vote on March 29 Mike Macnair outlines the recommendations of the Communist Platform T he final agenda for the Left Unity policy conference was published on March 25.1 At a meeting two days earlier, Communist Platform supporters discussed our attitude to the various policy documents and motions - as they stood before amendments and compositing (see p11). Then in the evening of March 25 the CP steering committee agreed on our attitude to the final version, noting in particular the amendments and composites. This article gives some comments and recommendations for voting on the basis of these decisions. Regrettably, it is clear that discussion of all of the issues on the agenda will be severely cramped. There will be 70 minutes to get through all the motions on the economy and austerity; 55 minutes for health and housing; 45 minutes for migration and Europe; 30 minutes for electoral strategy; 20 minutes for trade unions; 25 minutes for environment; 30 minutes for antiracism and the national question; and 30 minutes for foreign policy. For a number of motions, listed at the back of the pack, time has not been allocated; and the various resolutions on aspects of building LU have, rightly, been referred to the incoming national council. Policy commission representatives will have five minutes, movers of motions three minutes, movers of amendments two minutes, and speakers from the floor - where time is allocated for them - variable very short times (for example, six minutes in total is allocated to speakers from the floor on the important and disputed question of whether LU should support proposals for a ‘basic’ or a ‘citizen’s’ income). Certainly none of the motions for which time has not been allocated will be reached. To the extent that this concerns motions put forward by individual members, this is in theory justifiable under the constitution adopted in November; but there are question marks over the political choices made by the standing orders committee, which has included some individual motions under the relevant agenda headings, but has omitted others, and some branch motions. These are perhaps legitimate political choices, but in the absence of a published explanation of the reasoning it is hard to see what the ground of the choices is. Thus, for example, though there is an agenda heading on ‘the state’, including Northampton’s motion on the right to protest and Glasgow’s on Edward Snowden, Norwich’s motion on the monarchy and House of Lords as well as Tina Becker’s and Peter Manson’s on democracy and Emily Orford’s and James Turley’s on freedom of information are not included. On the other hand, in the agenda section on ‘internationalism and the national question’, Glasgow’s motion is supplemented by the inclusion of individual motions put forward by Steve Freeman and Russell Caplan and by Ben Lewis and Justin Constantinou. The choice is clearly not driven by the idea that we should discuss issues which appear to be controversial, since time has not been found for Nottinghamshire’s motion on sex workers or the LGBT caucus’s ‘wrecking’ amendment to it. Even in spite of this pruning of the agenda, it will still clearly be too tight and we should expect at least section 8 (foreign policy, etc) to drop off. Cardiff, Crouch End and Hackney have rightly proposed that the foreign policy commission document should be referred back. It would be better, therefore, to have this vote at the no doubt be some poor sod of a junior official in a benefits office who got charged, not the senior policy-makers, the Daily Hate Mail journos, or the financial sector insiders who are at the end of the day behind the creation of destitution. Health, housing beginning of the conference, in order to enable the SOC to re-timetable. It cannot be stressed too strongly how undesirable, irrational and antidemocratic is the method LU has de facto adopted of overloaded agendas in one-day meetings, making any serious discussion of individual issues impossible. It would have been a lot better to limit the agenda further to allow proper discussion of fewer issues, but this is now past praying for. The same can be said of the more fundamental alternative: that LU should have gone for a two-day delegate conference (even then on a more limited agenda) to enable a proper discussion. It also appears that the SOC has adopted the anti-democratic ‘Citrine’ line that passing one motion causes another on the same topic to fall (eg, at section 3 on Europe), as opposed to the more democratic procedure of establishing whether motions are counterposed to one another and, if they are, voting them one against the other. They have not followed Citrine consistently: in relation to the economic policy commission document, subsequent motions which are partially counter to its present text are to be treated as amendments to it if they pass. Not all of the necessary compositing has been done. It is clear that all the housing motions could and should have been composited together, since there is nothing actually counterposed in any of them, but merely differences of expression (with the single exception of a small idiotic proposal in the Farnos/Healy motion from the LGBT caucus to abolish buy-to-let mortgages, which as drafted would abolish the ability of councils and housing associations to borrow for house-building). Similarly, it is clear that on Europe, motions 21 from Lambeth and 22 from Manchester, and Nik Barstow and Ruth Cashman, definitely should have been composited, since both are merely variants of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s model motion. In fact, there is no obvious reason in principle why these motions should not have been composited with 23 from Milton Keynes, and that of Sarah McDonald and Phil Kent. The general line is the same: for common action of the workers’ movement on a European scale, as opposed to ‘left Ukipism’; the AWL model has some more detail on action in the European elections, while Milton Keynes/McDonald and Kent (based on the Communist Platform’s model) has more on the sort of Europe we want to see. Both 21/22 and 23 have in effect a common line with 19 from Crouch End - the refoundation of Europe on a socialist basis - but, since Crouch End’s motion mainly recites the declaration of the European Left Party, compositing would have been cumbersome. All the same, all three motions can stand together, and 21-23 should be part of the same discussion with Crouch End’s motion and Southwark’s, rather than (as the SOC has decided) forming a separate one after voting on 19-20 has taken place. Austerity, economic policy We agreed at our March 23 CP meeting that the ‘economics policy’ commission document (No1) should be referred back: it is written too much within the framework of imagining that the UK can on its own break with the main lines of the dominant policy of the international capitalist class, and is in consequence unrealistic. It is not clear if there will be an opportunity to move reference-back. If not, a vote against the document would be appropriate. However, some of the amendments would worsen it and others would improve it. The commission’s arguments for rejecting the ‘unconditional basic income’ proposal are sound, and the amendments proposed by Leamington Spa (1A) and by Micheline and Christine Wilson (1B) should therefore be rejected. Brighton and Hove’s amendment 1C to add that “We would disregard intellectual property rights where those rights pertain to inalienable natural commons ...” is weak - there is a strong case even for free marketeers, let alone for socialists, for the complete abolition of intellectual property rights.2 But it is an improvement on the existing text and should be supported. Manchester’s amendment 1D adds the useful point that an LU government would be willing to use expropriation as a means of coercing capitalist sabotage and should be supported. Lambeth’s amendments (1E), on raising the state pension to median income levels, on placing the economy “in the hands of the majority” and democratic decisionmaking, on a 35-hour week without loss of pay, the abolition of VAT, and raising the top rate of income tax to 90%, are all supportable. The Class Struggle Platform’s ‘programme for resistance’ (2) is a typical Trot ‘action programme’, a combination of minimalist and utterly vague proposals. It was also already out of date in November 2013 and is even more so now. It should be rejected. West London (as amended by Sheffield and Loughborough - No3) proposes a unity approach to anticuts campaigning: clearly correct. Southwark (4) proposes a campaign for a 21-hour week - more radical than the commission’s 35-hour week, but not strictly counterposed. This idea should be supported. The Manchester Central/Manchester South motion on zero-hours contracts has been improved by Oxford’s amendment to add in working with trade unions (5); it should be supported. Bristol, as amended by Barnet (6), calls for support for Owen Jones’ ‘Agenda for hope’, and for LU to affiliate to the People’s Assembly. It is quite right for LU to affiliate to the People’s Assembly - the more unity in action, the better. But the ‘Agenda for hope’ is another Britainonly utopia. For this reason, if the resolution cannot be taken in parts, a vote against is appropriate. Norwich (7) offers another ‘action programme’. Brighton and Hove (7A) have correctly proposed that this “needs more work and should be remitted”. Birmingham (8) proposes a campaign against the proposed USEU trade deal (TTIP). The reasoning is national-sovereignty based and thus unsound, but the substantive proposal is supportable. Leicester’s motion on Atos (9) is slightly dated, given the company’s announced withdrawal from its contract, but makes the fundamentally correct point that “in so far as an assessment of particular individual needs is necessary, it should be undertaken by properly qualified professional experts”. Glasgow (9A), for some reason, proposes to amend this by adding at the end “… who are in full-time work within the DWP”. Why this is appropriate is not obvious: why would it not be appropriate for an assessment to be made by, for example, the claimant’s own GP or relevant specialist? Glasgow’s amendment should be rejected and Leicester’s motion should be passed. Wandsworth (10) proposes to “make it illegal to leave a person destitute: ie, without any money to live on”. This proposal should be rejected. Who would be charged with this proposed crime? If it were actually to be adopted in legislation, it would We took the view on March 23 that the health policy commission document (11) is supportable. On Tuesday the steering committee discussed the two amendments put forward by Hackney (11A - one to add to the “immediate demands”, and the other attacking “big pharma”). We agreed that these should be supported. Lambeth’s amendment (11B), directed against conflicts of interest in persons responsible for NHS purchasing, merely states the current law. It is therefore redundant, but mostly harmless3 and should be passed. Islington, West London and Barnet’s composite (12) calling for a unitary approach to campaigns for the defence of the NHS is clearly correct and should be passed. Birmingham’s motion on defence of the NHS (13) appears to be redundant, duplicating material in the policy commission document, but if put to the vote should be supported. I said earlier that the housing motions should all have been composited. Given that they have not been, they should all be supported, with the exception of the Farnos/ Healy LGBT caucus motion (17). The main problem with this motion is its sectionalist method: it makes (mostly sound) proposals for general housing policy, but motivates them entirely by the suggested concerns of a particular section (lesbians, gay men and trans people). These concerns could and should have been addressed by way of an amendment or amendments to a general motion. LU needs to offer a global political alternative in the interests of the working class as a whole, synthesising rather than merely aggregating the concerns of particular sections. It is a minor point that, as indicated above, the motion contains a proposal on banning ‘buyto-let’ mortgages which is stupidly over-broad. Both Liverpool’s motion (14) and the LGBT caucus motion contain a small error: the demand to “re-legalise rent strikes”. Since rent strikes have never been legal (until 1977 they amounted to criminal conspiracy, and since then have continued to amount to tortious conspiracy), the right word would be ‘legalise’. But, apart from making LU look slightly silly, the error does not affect the substance. Liverpool’s motion also contains the proposal that “Housing should be aesthetically pleasing to the eye and take into account existing designs of properties in the local area”. This is probably a legacy of the old Militantled Liverpool Labour council in the 1980s (which built new terraced housing because that was what locals wanted), but risks sounding like prince Charles’s anti-modernism. Diversity of housing provision and mixed-use neighbourhoods are, in fact, most likely to produce the aesthetic merits aimed at. Nonetheless, this minor weakness is not a reason to oppose what is generally a supportable motion. West London’s amendment 14A to Liverpool’s motion, in support of housing cooperatives, should be supported. 4 Lee Rock and Sarah McDonald have composited their motion on housing with Milton Keynes’s 16 (both are derived from the Communist Platform model) and propose the remaining difference as an 7 worker 1003 March 27 2014 weekly ITALY amendment (16A). So Milton Keynes calls for rents set at an “affordable” level, and Rock/McDonald, following our original model, for them to be set at a “token” level. The substance of the difference is that the Communist Platform believes housing provision can and should be taken wholly into the need-based sector. Europe, migration The first item on this agenda point is No18, the anti-racism policy group’s document on migration policy. This document is substantially better than the general ‘anti-racism policy’ document produced by this group, but is still written within the framework of the sectionalism dominant on the left, and also consists to a large extent of factual claims which will result in its becoming rapidly obsolete. We would argue for reference-back with an instruction to strip it down to the core of long-term policy proposals. But if - as seems likely - there is no opportunity to move reference-back or this fails, the essential policy proposals in the document are supportable and we are recommending that comrades vote for it. I said above that most of the motions on Europe should have been composited. No19, from Crouch End, supporting the European Left Party’s declaration for a “refoundation of Europe”, has been weakened by the acceptance of West London’s amendment, adding that “There is no question that the EU is an anti-working class institution and we support the struggles against ... ongoing neoliberal attacks which are intrinsic to the EU”: true enough, but in this context it omits to mention that the UK is also an anti-working class institution and “neoliberal attacks” are equally intrinsic to it (through its dependence on City finance), so that the effect of the amendment is to convey the impression that the EU is more antiworking class than the UK, which is straightforwardly false. Nonetheless, in spite of these weasel words, the motion is supportable. Southwark’s motion 20 on LU’s stance in the 2014 EU elections - urging neutrality except where regions decide otherwise, where there is a threat of a “fascist or xenophobic” victory - should be rejected. The idea that LU should automatically be neutral where the choice is between Labour and Conservatives is nonsense: the Conservatives are as “xenophobic” as the UK Independence Party. We should not automatically call for a Labour vote - among other reasons because there may be better left candidates; but we should not make neutrality the starting point. The AWL-model motion in its two forms from Lambeth (21) and Manchester/Barstow and Cashman (22), is also supportable. Manchester proposes four amendments (21A) to Lambeth’s version. The first and third should be rejected. Contrary to the first, opposing entry to the euro (in reality, this is not a live issue) is a British nationalist position. Rejecting the statement is just flat-earthism. The motivation offered for opposing euro entry ignores the equally undemocratic and unaccountable character of the Bank of England (and its undemocratic and unaccountable character when it was formally nationalised). Manchester’s second amendment would substitute “For a Europe of democratic socialist states” for the original’s “For a European workers’ government”. ‘Workers’ government’ slogans in the abstract are pretty meaningless, but “For a Europe of democratic socialist states” promotes socialism-in-one-country politics. This amendment should also be opposed. The third amendment is to delete from the original “To refuse support from LU as an organisation to all nonworking class parties and candidates and all parties supporting cuts, austerity and privatisation of our services”. This amendment should be supported for the same reason that Southwark’s motion 20 should be opposed: we should not be completely and automatically neutral between the open representatives of capital (Tories, etc) and the Labour Party, which claims by its name to represent the independent interests of the working class. C r o u c h E n d ’s a l t e r n a t i v e amendment to this point - to add at the end of the original paragraph 5 “without excluding the possibility of specific discussions, for example with the Green Party, over how to ensure that a far-right or fascist candidate is not elected” - should be rejected. It reflects the common illusion that the Greens are part of the left - and is in any case nonsense, since, where there is a real threat of a far-right candidate being elected, LU support for the Greens would not make the slightest difference to the outcome. West London (22A) proposes to delete the paragraph in the Manchester/ Barstow and Cashman version which identifies demanding withdrawal from the EU as British nationalist. This proposal should be rejected, on the same grounds as Manchester’s proposal to amend Lambeth’s point 3: it is flatearthist. (The underlying problem is that there is a large part of the British left, including much of the Trotskyistderived section, which wants to play footsie with British nationalism, but does not want to recognise itself as advocates of British nationalist ideas and ‘national roads to socialism’. The result is bizarre contortions.) Milton Keynes’ motion 23, also moved by Sarah McDonald and Phil Kent, is our own proposal from the Communist Platform and we obviously support it. The argument of the SOC that the motion should automatically fall if motion 22 and amendment 22A are carried is anti-democratic. While amendment 22A would delete the opposition to EU withdrawal from motion 22, it would put nothing in its place. Even if the two resulting motions are counter, they should be voted against each other rather than following Citrine’s method. Electoral strategy, the state Rugby’s motion 24, calling for steps towards “one party of the left” is plainly correct and should be passed. The same is true of Pete McLaren’s and Dave Landau’s motion 27 calling for discussions with a view to avoiding clashes and to electoral pacts in the 2015 general election. What was previously Crouch End’s motion to the November founding conference and West London’s and Huddersfield’s amendments to it is now motion 25, put forward in the name of West London. The amendments improve the motion, but leave in place the ‘poison pill’ that the best (election campaigns with local mass support) is made the enemy of the good (election campaigns as a means of winning local mass support). It should be rejected. So should Rugby’s amendment 25A, allowing local LU groups to contest elections, but to choose “under what electoral label they stand”. This would leave LU merely as an umbrella group for the left status quo ante. Bristol’s motion 26 calls for prospective Green and Labour candidates to join us in campaigning for an eight-point plan (related, though not identical, to the ‘Agenda for hope’). This is the opposite error to the autoanti-Labourism of Southwark’s 20 and Lambeth’s point 5 in No21, turning LU into a mere pressure group auxiliary to the ‘official lefts’ in Labour. It should be rejected. Northampton’s motion 28 on defending the right to protest, especially on campuses, is clearly supportable, though the call for support for John McDonnell’s early day motion from February is a little dated. We should also obviously vote for Glasgow’s motion 29 on support for Edward Snowden. As I indicated at the outset, it is odd to have an agenda item, part of which is on ‘the state’, and then exclude from this item Norwich’s motion 49 on the monarchy and House of Lords, Tina Becker’s and Peter Manson’s No53 on democracy, Emily Orford’s and James Turley’s No54 on freedom of information, and Moshé Machover’s and Steve Cooke’s No55 on governmental power (the last three from Communist Platform): we are going to talk about ‘the state’, but only about concrete instances of repression, not about general principles. I guess that this exclusion reflects the desire of some LU people to dodge the choice between constitutional loyalism and pursuit of independent working class politics. This is also reflected in the Manchester and West London amendments to the Europe motions, which falsely present the EU as more anti-working class than the UK’s constitutional monarchy. Trade unions, environment Very little needs to be said about the motions on trade union strategy. Composite 30 from Sheffield, as amended by West London and Birmingham, should be supported. So should amendment 30A from Lambeth, which strengthens it, and West London’s motion 31, which makes more elementary but still correct points. The environment motions are also all supportable, though they would clearly have benefitted from more compositing and a certain amount of editing. Southwark’s motion 32 on floods and climate change is largely composed of a newspaper-style article, but the substantive policy proposals at the end are sound. Milton Keynes’s motion 33 on the environment, based on the Communist Platform’s model, is more general in character; we obviously support it. We also obviously support Michael Copestake’s and Robert Eagleton’s amendment 33A to restore to it the point from the model version that “Left Unity rejects the claim that workers create all wealth under capitalism. There is also the wealth that comes from the labour of peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and middle class strata. Above all that, there is nature too.” We oppose Lambeth’s amendment 33B, which would delete the point that “Concrete jungles, urban sprawl, huge farms and uninterrupted industrialised agriculture are profoundly alienating and inhuman. Towns and cities should be full of trees, roof gardens, planted walls, allotments, wild parks and little farms.” It is not clear what the point of this amendment is. The Stockport and Manchester composite 34 on fracking is also clearly to be supported. Anti-racism, national question This agenda item consists of the anti-racism policy group’s main document, plus three resolutions on the national question. We would urge reference-back of the former (35). It is framed by the assumptions of sectionalism and ‘intersectionality’; it fails to recognise the existence of forms of nativism, particularly against European migrants, which cannot without extreme artificiality be characterised as ‘racism’ or as part of the same complex as empire-derived racism; and it fails to recognise the existence of systems of carrot-based divide and rule, under which the state treats certain ‘elders’ of particular BME ‘communities’ as authoritative interlocutors and beneficiaries of largesse from central and local government. Reference-back would allow these serious problems to be corrected and some of the worthwhile policies proposed to be adopted on a clearer basis - or at least a fuller debate than is possible at this very rushed conference. If it is not referred back, we would recommend a vote against. We support Glasgow’s motion 36 on internationalism and the national question, and oppose Cardiff ’s amendment 36A to remove “Left Unity will not support Scottish or Welsh nationalism”, which attempts to take the edge off it. We also oppose West London’s amendment 36B, for reasons referred to above in connection with the Europe agenda point. Support for Glasgow’s motion and opposition to Cardiff’s amendment obviously implies opposition to Steve Freeman’s and Russell Caplan’s motion 37 (supported by Southwark and Worcester), which is in substance advocacy of a ‘yes’ vote in the coming referendum on Scots independence. We - obviously - support Ben Lewis’s and Justin Constantinou’s motion 38, which is the CP’s model motion offering a strategic alternative policy on the national question. Foreign policy We agreed on March 23 to urge reference-back of the foreign policy commission document (39) as incoherent and informed by ‘socialism in one country’ ideas. It is pleasing to see that Crouch End, Cardiff and Hackney (39A) are all proposing to refer it back, and this proposal should clearly be supported. An alternative refer-back version with positive directions from Hackney appears out of logical order as No39C. How this will be voted is not clear, but I guess the Hackney version, 39C, will be subsumed in the general proposal; if not, it is supportable. If reference-back fails, amendments will be taken from Crouch End, Nottingham, Lambeth and Leicester. Crouch End’s amendments (39B) are fiddly and hard to follow; they appear to be within the same incoherent general framework as the policy commission document and should be rejected. Nottingham’s amendment (39D) usefully stresses Britain’s imperialist past and present, and should be supported. Lambeth’s (39E) also stresses the issue of imperialism and is supportable. Leicester’s motion 41 is effectively an amendment to the policy commission document, urging unilateral nuclear disarmament, and should be supported. Leicester’s motion 40 on setting up an international exchange programme for youth is in principle supportable, but does not address practicalities at all. It should be remitted to the national council to address the issue more concretely. If not, a vote in favour would be justified. Manchester ’s motion 42 on the Syrian civil war should be supported. Sheffield’s amendment 42A, reducing point 1 of the positive policy recommendations to “Oppose all foreign intervention in the Syrian civil war” strengthens the resolution by simplifying it, and should also be supported. The composite motion 43 on Palestine and the boycott, divestment and sanction campaign from Waltham Forest, Glasgow and York is stronger than either of the motions previously circulated. It will presumably be opposed by AWL members - who are against BDS as too general, inconsistent with the ‘two states’ policy, and apt to sever links with the workers’ movement. It is also true that advocates of BDS sometimes draw an illusory parallel with the fall of apartheid in South Africa, which actually resulted from the unionisation of black workers and the fall of the USSR, removing the geopolitical need of the USA to support the apartheid regime. The point of boycott campaigns is, however, solidarity in symbolism; and this resolution commits LU to no more than participating in this solidarity in symbolic rejection of the settler-colonial regime in Israel. It should be supported. Motion 44 on war and peace from Milton Keynes is a modified version of the Communist Platform model and we would urge support for it. Equally obviously, we would support the amendment from Yassamine Mather and Mike Macnair, which would restore to the motion the point in the original model, that “Peace cannot come courtesy of bodies such as the United Nations - an assembly of exploiters and murderers. It is the duty of socialists to connect the popular desire for peace with the aims of revolution. Only by disarming the bourgeoisie and through the victory of international socialism can the danger of war be eliminated.” Illusions in the UN are a very common mistake of the left and should be combated. Motion 45 from Mark Fischer and David Isaacson on the standing army and people’s militia is again a Communist Platform model motion and we obviously support it. It draws out the concrete implications of a really defensive policy. I am told it has been characterised as ‘mad’: it is a ‘madness’ we are proud to share with ... the notorious revisionist, Eduard Bernstein. The idea that it is ‘mad’ reflects just how far the British left has moved right and adapted itself to accepting the role of her majesty’s mercenary armed forces. Others The remaining policy motions, 4655, are very unlikely to be taken, since time has not been allocated for them. In the unlikely event that any of them are put to the vote, here are our recommendations. Leicester’s No46 on art and culture is inoffensive, but should be referred to the national council, since it is about building LU, not about policy. Nottinghamshire’s motion 47 on sex workers proposes merely to move police powers and the ‘unlawfulness’ of prostitution around. The LGBT caucus’s amendment 47A would draw the sting and should be supported; if that is not passed, the motion should be rejected. Birmingham’s motion 48 on a “listening campaign” is a Blairite proposal for policy-making by focus group and should be rejected. Norwich (49) on the monarchy should be supported. Nottinghamshire (50) identifies politics in terms of intersectionalism and should be rejected. Ian Donovan’s and Simon Wells’ No51 on crime is a Communist Platform model and should be supported. Robert Eagleton’s and Lucy Stoneleigh’s No52 on support for Robert Eagleton’s campaign for the NUS executive is individualistic and anyhow obsolete; it should be withdrawn and, if not, rejected. Nos5355 are Communist Platform model motions on fundamental issues about the state structure, and we obviously favour them being passed l [email protected] Notes 1. The standing orders committee report is at http://leftunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ Standing-Orders-Report-Spring-2014-2.pdf, and the motions and amendments at http://leftunity. org/submitted-conference-motions-commissiondocuments. 2. See my articles, ‘A bridge too far’ (Weekly Worker December 18 2003), and ‘Copyright or human need’ (December 14 2006). 3. There is a potential trap in it, which is that the logic of the law of ‘conflicts of interest’ has been used to support compulsory competitive tendering and against public officials accepting internal bids: ie, in favour of privatisation. But, as drafted, the motion is limited to direct conflicts of financial interest. 4. Though with due attention to what can be done about the potential use of ‘housing cooperatives’ in the current law as an artificial device to deny tenant security: eg, the problem created in Berrisford v Mexfield Housing Cooperative [2011] UKSC 52. 8 March 27 2014 1003 worker weekly SOCIAL MEDIA The internet in the epoch of decline Extravagant revolutionary claims are made for new digital media and the technological avant-garde. The truth, argues Paul Demarty, is more complicated A t the end of 2011, The Guardian published a short interactive quiz - entitled ‘How revolutionary were you in 2011?’1 It was, after all, a good year to be a revolutionary, with the overthrow of Ben Ali and Mubarak, the student protests and the Occupy movement. Time magazine named “the protestor” its person of the year; the BBC’s in-house leftie and sometime-Trot, Paul Mason, published, to wide acclaim, Why it’s kicking off everywhere. Answering the quiz is odd, however, because, according to The Guardian, invariably the most ‘revolutionary’ response in 2011 was to … follow the Twitter feeds of various protestors and their chosen hashtags. We had inklings of this political approach previously, when mass protests erupted after the Iranian presidential election, and were promptly credited to the revolutionary power of the same microblogging platform; not three years later, the Twitter Ideology was well rooted, and animated in this country small protest movements such as UK Uncut. According to this view, Twitter allowed a message - a ‘call to action’ - to spread like wildfire without the apparent mediation of traditional activist institutions, such as political parties, trade unions or ideologically defined small groups. Technoutopianism is hardly new, but older versions had proposed technology as a way to overcome resource scarcity and eliminate human labour, leaving us free to live in peace and luxury. The claim of the Twitterites is different technology allows disruption. As Finley Peter Dunne said of the press, technology comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. It erodes oppressive hierarchies, allowing not the stifling quiet of the techno-utopias past, but a carnival of creative chaos. Anarchism has finally come true. This ideology persists to this day. It persists perhaps most strongly in inverted form, among enraged authoritarians, great and small. Alex Callinicos infamously called the Facebook social network “the dark side of the internet”,2 as the Socialist Workers Party crisis spilled into the public eye and was raked over, point by point, by an audience largely on social media. Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty wrote an article linking social media to shortening attention spans among comrades, shortly after the AWL had its own Facebook-driven scandal.3 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has recently blocked Twitter in Turkey, blaming its users for “all kinds of immorality, all kinds of espionage and spying”.4 On the face of it, however, the notion that social media is that transformative is absurd. The student movement was utterly defeated, and the remnants of its key organisations are in tatters. The SWP has basically lost its entire student cohort, many of whom were players in 2010-11, and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts is quietly drowning in mutual recrimination between the AWL and identity politics fanatics. Occupy is, by all reasonable measures, dead as a doornail; it has dissolved into various liberal campaigning groups. The ‘Arab spring’ is very definitely over. The Tunisians and Egyptians replaced their military dictators not with techno-literate liberals or leftwingers, but with Islamists, and in the case of Egypt, supported in large numbers what amounts to a counterrevolution by the old regime. UK Uncut got a Tweeting to the future brief wave of press attention for its anti-tax avoidance protests; but in the years since it has become easier for corporations to avoid tax. All of the supposed social media-enabled protest movements have failed, abjectly. And yet, the idea persists. Understanding why requires placing social media in its broader historical context: firstly, of the ‘web apparatus’, the technical-social structure of production in information technology; and, secondly, of the underlying political and ideological dynamics of our period. Web and decline To understand the web apparatus, we must first reverse a commonplace concerning the significance of the internet. It is commonly thought that the ‘information age’ confirms the continuing vitality of capitalism as a system. The productive forces have advanced, in this sphere, with extraordinary rapidity in the 25 years since the first web pages were created. Moore’s Law - a statistical hypothesis that computing power doubles every 18 months or so - has held up remarkably well, despite the manufacture of microprocessors hitting certain limits of the laws of physics along the way. Stock trading is considerably automated; markets are almost instantaneously responsive to information; Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ gets more real every day. All that is solid melts - not so much into air, but the light that traverses the world’s fibre-optic pipelines. The truth is the opposite. The advent of this brave new world is a sharp expression of capitalism’s decline as a social formation. We say ‘decline’, here, in the sense used by Hillel Ticktin: the immanent laws of capital, and the operations of the market, decreasingly determine productive activity. Socialisation and concentration of production, the hypertrophy of the state and other factors begin to take over from the laws of capital, though capitalist exploitation persists.5 As a simple matter of history, the internet is the product of what you could call the military-academic complex. It speaks, first of all, to the needs of the US department of defence, and also those of various departments of computer science - and from thence came the funds and resources needed to get it off the ground. The same is quite true of the web, which was invented at Cern by Tim Berners Lee Cern being the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. It is, in short, a product of the state. Indeed, the links are deeper. The first functioning computers were created to aid code-breaking during World War II; throughout the subsequent half-decade, the primary drivers of advances in computing were state actors. The private sector has, at particular times and places, had a serious role in breakthrough innovations in computer infrastructure. Much pioneering work was done at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, for example; but the most important inventions have ended up, one way or another, in the public domain. The Unix operating system and C programming language were products of Bell Labs; but the former was eventually superseded by free clones such as GNU, FreeBSD and Linux, and the latter published as an open standard. As a result of that tendency, the second - more recent - major driver of innovation arrived: free and open-source software (FOSS). Free: software is ‘free as in free beer’ (ie, it costs nothing), and ‘free as in free speech’ (there are no juridical obstacles to using or modifying the software). Open source: the source code (ie, the program written by the programmer, as opposed to the series of zeroes and ones actually executed by the computer) is published, so anyone can read and learn from the code, or write modifications to improve it. FOSS is a most peculiar phenomenon - it amounts to an enormous gift economy, sponsored and sustained both by the capitalist state and large capitalist enterprises. Institutions from the government to Google, to The Guardian maintain open-source software. Development is crowdsourced on an enormous scale: a programmer in Japan can fix a bug in a text editor written by people at a British newspaper, and the resulting code can be obtained by a government agency in Brazil - where, perhaps, the editor will be developed further as new requirements emerge, and those new features make it back ‘upstream’ to the main code repository … From a communist perspective, clearly, there is much to like about FOSS - but its greatest virtue is that it works, and it works better than proprietary products. It is not just a ‘nice idea’, but the solution of first resort for entire classes of technical problems. The vast majority of web servers - computers whose purpose is to deliver web pages to computer users - run variants of Linux, or other free Unix derivatives, for example. It is not altogether surprising. Servers are critical infrastructure, exposed to everyone who wants to make a connection - and thus various malicious hackers (‘black hats’); without access to the code, you are left guessing as to whether the developers have properly secured their software. Should your server come crashing to a halt due to a software bug, a solution can be rapidly crowdsourced - rather than waiting, as one often has to, months for some trivial fault to be corrected by an overworked team at a private company, guarding their code like a stash of bullion. Meet the new rentiers Of course, it is hardly atypical for the state to take on the function of maintaining basic infrastructure, which is then used by capitalist enterprises to turn a profit. Indeed, it is the norm: even when, as in this country, such infrastructure has nominally been privatised, it is usually propped up by state largesse in a basically corrupt arrangement. (FOSS is more remarkable here.) Yet what is striking about the web apparatus is how resistant it is to profitable productive activity. Let us imagine an old-fashioned circuit of capital. A Bolton factory produces so many yards of cotton. These are transferred via rail to London, where the material is worked up into garments. Here, the infrastructure (rail) enables the realisation of surplus value embodied in the cotton through its purchase and incorporation into further production (the sweatshop). Now, let us take one of the most profitable web companies on earth Google. What does Google produce? Sure, there are subsidiaries (Motorola and so on) knocking out commodities in, as the tech argot calls the material world, ‘meatspace’. But that is not the point. Google ‘produces’ you. Google makes money traditionally through the entrapment of millions perhaps billions - of users with free services (many of which, admittedly, are better than any of the competition). These users are valuable to advertisers: Google sells this enormous base, coupled with some highly ingenious data-crunching code to target advertisements at relevant users. It then rents that code to others, who can use the sophisticated algorithms to gather advertising revenue from their own sites. Google became a multibillion dollar company essentially through a colossal, unending act of product placement. Of course, there is the matter of their phone business; but it is an illusion to suppose that Google, or Apple, are making the real money out of the admittedly nice hardware; or even the software as such. The more time goes on, the more Google’s Android phone operating system traps consumers into the Google brand. (On my Googlebranded phone, even text messages are sent through Google’s own Hangouts app.) You are increasingly locked in to the Google app store. I say ‘increasingly’, as Android was initially pitched as an open-source alternative to Apple’s iOS - which has been based on this model from the beginning. What is interesting here is that all players, whatever their origins (including, nowadays, Microsoft), are being objectively pushed towards this ‘walled garden’ service model. The app stores, naturally, are nothing without apps. But it is clear where the power lies. The relationship between independent app developers and Google, Apple and the rest resembles not the relationship between Lancashire cotton mills and London sweatshops, but rather that between landlord and peasant, or between Tesco and the farms who produce its food. It is an exploitative rent relationship - the major consumer-tech and web corporations are rentiers. A similar situation obtains in other matters. Take music. Whether or not the rate of profit across capitalism is declining, it is perfectly clear that the rate of profit in the music industry has completely collapsed in the past decade - thanks to the internet, and the ease with which recordings can be copied. And so now money is made not by record labels or stores (it never really was made by musicians), but by companies - Apple again with iTunes, Spotify and similar streaming services - who can act as gatekeepers and artificially restrict supply. Such companies play the same role in the music industry today as Opec does in oil production. In order to sustain their privileged and profitable positions, Google, Apple and co call on the traditional agency the capitalist state. Recent years have seen enormous, absurd, multi-billiondollar patent lawsuits dragged through the courts. Every major player in the mobile space has sued and been sued at least once in such litigation. The point is not, of course, to drive each other out of business - success and failure more or less balances out, and the only 9 worker 1003 March 27 2014 weekly ITALY MIGRATION caste that reliably gains from these things is the lawyers. The point is that, given the staggering costs involved, no other serious competitors can emerge unless they already have billions in cash reserves and an army of lawyers. This obscurely exploitative relationship permeates modern tech. We have mentioned open source; and repeat that, to those capitalist ideologues who believe that only the cold compulsion of hunger can stir a feckless human into productive activity, its success is a standing rebuke. By the same token, however, open-source development amounts to unpaid labour. The profit on this labour is realised by the established players, who are in the best position to benefit financially from improvement in the robustness and usefulness of the web as a platform - the rentiers. The hacker ideology We need now to consider the effects of this ambiguous relationship of exploitation on developers themselves, and the rise to supremacy of a particular ideological structure among those who build the web. This is necessary for assessing the political significance of the web for numerous reasons. First of all, the hacker ideology is now a matter of big politics.6 Wikileaks, the Snowden files, Anonymous and other ‘hacktivists’ - all are very public, very visible expressions of this ideology at work. Secondly, social networks are built predominantly by tech startups based on what some talented group of coders think would be a popular idea; those roots are visible in the final product. This is nowhere more true than with Twitter, whose use of ampersands, hash signs and text commands resembles nothing in natural language, but very much resembles code. Early adopters were universally geeks, who fell (as they often do) for the elegant simplicity of the idea; only later did it become the horror show it is today. Thirdly, and consequently, the hacker mindset might tell us something about why people’s behaviour on the social web is so frequently irrational and bizarre. Programming is, by its nature, skilled labour. It may be more or less skilled; there is a world of difference between writing a few lines of code to make a drop-down menu on a website, say, and writing an operating system kernel. All, however, require at least a level of mathematical literacy, logical thinking and (last, but not least) typing accuracy. The most able hackers will have a grasp of how code is translated into instructions a computer can understand, the workings of computer hardware, computational algorithms, and even highly abstract formal mathematical logic (for example, Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus is the basis for a whole family of programming languages). Skilled labour is traditionally a problematic category for Marxist political economy. My comrade, Mike Macnair, has argued - and I agree that skills possess value as means of production, and thus represent the interpenetration of classes: the more skills one possesses (provided they can be rented in the market), the more a skilled worker becomes, in practical terms, a petty proprietor. As Mike points out, this is particularly clear in tech, where a salaried programmer can often transfer with ease to a start-up or an independent consultancy.7 In hacker consciousness, this appears as power. There is something intoxicating about issuing instructions - however rudimentary - to a machine, and seeing that machine obey. It is not necessary, even, to be in material comfort to experience this power. You can hack in a day job, as a selfemployed professional, or on the dole queue: until your privations grow sufficiently severe that you are forced to pawn your laptop, there is always the ability to program. So far, so classically petty bourgeois. For this ability to be exercised beyond merely playing around, however, there is the additional necessity that one must be connected to the broader ecosystem of code. Whereas the traditional petty proprietor exists primarily in some particular corner of ‘meatspace’ (it is generally implausible for a plumber in Croydon to be called out on a job in Cheltenham; a small shop can only ever be on one street; etc), the hacker’s line of work is immanently and necessarily global. Hackerdom is thus a particular caste of the enlightened petty bourgeoisie; the ideology specific to it reflects its conditions of existence. The apparently flat hierarchies of the hacker world engender a fierce, small-L libertarianism. Hackers resent the domination of corporate employers, which will turn them into mindless programming drones - ‘code churners’ or ‘code monkeys’ (hence the peculiar phenomenon of companies like Google claiming to remain ‘startups’ for years after their graduation into the financial elite). Yet the supposedly flat hierarchies are belied by the enormous influence and prestige that accumulates both to the rentier tech corporations and to the individuals who lead the most important open-source projects. (Guido van Rossum, who created the Python programming language, was jokily declared “benevolent dictator for life” - a term which has entered into general use to describe such individuals.) The cult of the nimble start-up company - for whom profit is an irritating distraction from ‘changing the world’ and ‘disrupting’ established markets - leads to the quasi-religious veneration of Silicon Valley gurus like Paul Graham, who founded Y-Combinator, an influential ‘start-up accelerator’. The common elements across hacker libertarianism consist in a distrust of formal authoritarian hierarchy - both in the corporate world and in government (it is no accident that both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have hacker backgrounds). Inevitably, however, this contradictory ideology divides. On the right, there is ultra-capitalist ideology - the subNietzschean free-market doctrines half-digested from Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. Its clearest present expression is bitcoin, a digital currency based on the fantasy economics of a strictly limited and privately minted money supply (software hard money, so to speak), by which Valley libertarians hope to ‘disrupt’ fractional reserve banking (so far, with extremely limited success). On the opposite end, there grows - ever more rapidly - the form of aggressive liberalism we on the left imperfectly call ‘intersectionality’ (in the tech world, such people are pejoratively called ‘social justice warriors’). It is as likely that someone will criticise bitcoin for being overly male as for being based on fatuous economic absurdities and conspiracy theories about ‘big government’. As it happens, this critique is more on the mark in the tech world than on the left. There is a macho undercurrent to the overwhelmingly male hacker culture, which is particularly obvious among the Ayn Rand worshippers. We may mention a recent scandal at Github, the most important hosting service for open-source code. Github prides itself on a flat, managerless company structure: everyone works in teams of formal equals. It used to have a rug at the door with a spoof of the US seal, welcoming visitors to the “meritocracy of Github”. But this was removed after the social-justice warriors complained it whitewashed the informal hierarchies that characterise society.8 Quite so. Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at the company, resigned recently amid allegations of sexual harassment and bullying; on her account, she was effectively hounded out of the company by the wife of one of the founders (who was not an employee) and a spurned suitor, with senior management and human resources laughably unable to deal with the disputes.9 Github claims to be investigating; in the meantime, contributors to discussion forums such as Hacker News took a break from arguing about which programming language was ‘the best’, and spent a few days quoting Jo Freeman’s The tyranny of structurelessness at each other. Familiar arguments For any leftwinger involved in the tech industry or open source, it is difficult to stifle a bitter smile of recognition when such flame wars break out between the rival factions of the Silicon Valley International. Freeman’s pamphlet seems to acquire ‘new’ relevance every year or so, as leftwing movements decide - again - to forget about all the problems Freeman identified, none too originally herself, in the 1970s women’s movement. We face frequently, in organisations such as Left Unity and the Labour Representation Committee, the claim that gender and other quotas are necessary to make ourselves more ‘inclusive’ to oppressed groups. The same arguments are raised in the tech world - more women in positions of influence means more tractions with a female audience, and thus more money. The obvious failure with the tech version is somewhat different to that on the left: put simply, Hollywood runs at a considerable profit by putting the biggest budget behind films targeted at males between 16 and 30; if anything, this skew is greater in video games … to even greater profits. The paradoxical end result is the same, however: year after year, leftwing organisations get older, whiter and more male, despite strenuous efforts in the contrary direction. The tech world is about as skewed as it can possibly get in that direction, to be sure, but there have been no demographic improvements. Over 90% of maintainers of opensource projects are male, as are all notable ‘benevolent dictators for life’. It would appear, then, that there is an underlying affinity between the ‘social justice’ libertarianism in the tech world and the contemporary left. One aspect of this is coincidental. The left seeks a liberated society, which is surely incompatible with the informal domination of traditional gender and other hierarchies; so the persistence of those hierarchies appears intolerable. They are just as intolerable from the perspective of tech libertarianism, however; they reveal the myth of ‘meritocracy’ for what it is. The deeper affinity has to do with the fetishism of novelty. The left seeks to escape the dead weight of historical failures; the hacker is inevitably drawn to the latest technology, the uncharted frontiers of the web. In both cases, it is a matter of plus ça change … This week’s hot new programming language is inevitably a variant on another language with a history stretching back decades; this week’s new mass movement hits the same buffers as the last one. The common root to both is the ceaseless motion of capitalist society, in which old hierarchies are overcome, only to be supplanted by newer ones; old unfreedoms are overturned by the masses, only to turn to poison in their hands. (We think of the fight for equal rights for women at work, which in spite of its importance, intensified the ‘double burden’ of domestic and employed labour.) The latest consumer articles are already passé before the warranty runs out (and generally break soon after). On a grander scale, every political promise is ditched as soon as it is made; every crisis is forgotten at the start of the next trivial upturn, because this time, ‘things will be different’. The tech world has no capability to act as a counterweight to capitalism’s inherent long-term memory loss indeed, it is an economic driver of it. The political left traditionally identifies as such a force (the ‘memory of the class’ and all that), but its forces are brutalised, demoralised and scattered. Moreover, the fragments of the far left are forever paralysed by the hope that that things will change, and change very rapidly - the next breakthrough is always just over the horizon. If you designed a medium of social intercourse ideally suited to this ideological structure, you could not do better than Twitter. The 140-character limit simply defines as a technical limit what is, for all intents and purposes, a social limit obtaining with considerable force anyway. The broader structure of the social network ensures that, in spite of global reach, communication follows the ‘line of least resistance’: perhaps more, even, than medieval serfs in a remote village, users of Twitter (and other social media) tend to communicate only with people with whom they fundamentally already agree, creating a feedback loop of mutual reinforcement resistant to external correction. If this reminds us of anything, it is surely those who call social media “the dark side of the internet”. The SWP has operated through bureaucratic force a regime in which only good news is allowed; the comrades gee each other up to believe that they are responsible, for example, for every setback faced by the British National Party (but not, of course, for its near-decade of constant growth up to 2009). The current crop of digitally enabled ‘new social movements’ fancy themselves to have overcome the deficiencies of the ‘old’ Trotskyist and other groups, but in fact reproduce - via horizontalism rather than bureaucracy - their most debilitating features. We may refer to a pretty dire book by Symon Hill, Digital revolutions, which purports to investigate the significance of social media for contemporary radical politics. In truth, his focus is overwhelmingly on the narrow matter of the ways in which social media help and hinder activism (on the one hand, actions are easier to organise; on the other, state forces find it easier to trace activists). This is, first of all, an odd vision of the web, which - despite its perpetual transformation - is fundamentally a medium for transmitting documents. The huge amount of theoretical, historical, satirical and other material which is now freely available to billions of people do not get a look-in from Hill. Put another way, the biographical material identifies Hill as an observant Quaker and co-founder of something called ‘Christianity Uncut’. Yet in this book, he barely finds time for a single mention of our saviour, Jesus Christ. We might naively expect that something of Hill’s religious faith informs his activism, that the life and teachings of Christ might hold some significance - as might their availability the world over in innumerable translations on the internet. Actually, no - there appears to be no connection between Hill’s faith and his activism; the former serves as an excuse for things we suspect he would be doing anyway. And so, by identifying as somehow historically novel - in short, by their lack of long-term memory - the doyens of Twitter politics are even more reliant on banal denunciations of a given malign state of affairs than Socialist Worker journalists. Ironically, they are even more obsessed with the next ‘meatspace’ demonstration. Because, while the SWP still has a developed theoretical tradition to cling to, however implausibly, the ‘new movements’ have only an echo chamber of their own prejudices. Strategy collapses into tactics; but, in doing so, all sense of perspective is lost. In the first place, the ‘news values’ of capitalist popular culture sneak in unannounced; witness the fierce arguments over allegedly misogynistic music videos, which consume easily as much energy on the Twitter left as the coalition government’s latest assault on civilisation. This tendency is reinforced by the increasingly barren content of the mainstream bourgeois media; liberal outlets like The Guardian, as convinced as the techno-utopians of their own doom and irrelevance, increasingly clog their comment pages with drivel that merely recycles the latest Twitter celebrity controversy. As the stakes get lower, Twitter groupthink becomes its opposite, the ‘narcissism of small differences’ trivial disagreements are cast as though one’s opponent was a paid-up member of the Klan (the absurd, mob-handed hounding of Laurie Penny over her supposed insensitivity to - wait for it - “women of colour hair issues” is a nice recent example). The philistinism of contemporary radical politics is not, of course, something produced by Twitter, Facebook and the like. Discussing the politics of social media and the modern web, however, means understanding what has not changed - indeed, what technology cannot change. The global, near-instantaneous communication enabled by the internet is one of the most extraordinary transformations in the means of communication perhaps the most significant of them all since the Gutenberg press. While Gutenberg undermined the material basis for the Catholic church’s control over written material, however, it could hardly destroy it alone. Likewise, though the web routinely makes a mockery of a D-notice or a super-injunction; while it undermines a petty Bonaparte like Callinicos or a greater one such as Erdoğan; we cannot expect it to alter the relation of forces in society as a whole, nor the underlying political-economic dynamics at work. As capitalism declines as a system, and US global power declines with it, the world becomes a more dangerous place. We have, at present, a standoff between Russian and Ukrainian nationalism, with the great powers tinkering in a confused way at the edges of the conflict; the disintegration of the Middle East; the rise of irrationalist rightwing movements from Iraq to Texas. These are problems that demand social solutions: indeed, revolutionary solutions. The internet, however, is indifferent as to whether it communicates communist literature or anti-Semitic ravings, Tolstoy or cat pictures, terrorist plots or the efforts of spooks to prevent them. The increasing scale of irrationality in political discourse on the web - from the birthers to the intersectionalists - reminds us that the techno-utopians are wrong, and the historic failure of leftwing politics hangs over us in the online world quite as much as it does in meatspace l [email protected] Notes 1. www.theguardian.com/world/reading-the-riots- blog/interactive/2011/dec/20/quiz-revolutionarywere-you-2011. 2. Socialist Review January 2013. 3. ‘Socialism, CPA and Facebook’ Solidarity November 6 2013. 4. The Guardian March 21. 5. See, for instance, ‘Declining forms, failing system’ Weekly Worker August 8 2013. 6. ‘Hacker’, here, is used in the sense of programmers in general, particularly those leaning towards open-source and newer technology, rather than the common usage which refers to criminals. 7. ‘Driven by ideas’ Weekly Worker February 14 2008. 8. http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug. 9. http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-annhorvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidationbehind-her-github-exit. 10 March 27 2014 1003 worker weekly REVIEW How Thatcher plotted our defeat Granville Williams (ed) Settling scores: the media, the police and the miners’ strike Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, pp139, £6.99 T his is the second of my reviews of books published to mark the 30th anniversary of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85. It was, in the words of the publishers, put together at “breakneck speed” between November 2013 and February 2014, and consists of 12 distinct subject headings - four of them by Granville Williams, a leading light in the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF). The others are written by press, TV or radio journalists, a print worker involved in the CPBF and a miner. The journalists pose something of a contrast, ranging from Peter Lazenby, northern reporter with the Morning Star, to Paul Routledge, Daily Mirror columnist, former political correspondent for The Independent on Sunday, ex-labour editor of The Times, and columnist and review writer for Tribune. Paul seems to be desperately trying to rehabilitate himself with the mining communities after having foreworded his own book on the strike with an apology to the queen for having disagreed with her opinion that the strike was “all the work of one man”. I do not know if he has ever apologised to the 187,000 strikers and their families for that apology ... The main stimulus for the appearance of Settling scores was the release of cabinet and other government papers under the 30-year rule. These led to the BBC’s Inside out programme of October 22 2012 and the discovery of doctored police evidence used in the Orgreave trial. There seems to be a direct link between the Orgreave fabricated evidence and the culture of impunity and deception which quickly re-emerged at Hillsborough within the same police force and under the same command and direction. These revelations prompted activists among the National Union of Mineworkers and women’s support groups to launch the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign - aimed at winning a public inquiry into the events at Orgreave and by implication into policing during the 12-month strike. The working class backlash to the eulogising of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister during the strike, following her death in April 2013, not to mention the craven press coverage and outrage, added a further stimulus. Finally, and most interestingly in terms of this book and new material, was the publication of the first set of 1984 cabinet papers. Nick Jones, BBC industrial and political correspondent between 1972 and 2002, a radio reporter during the strike and author of a number of books, does a good job of analysing what the released papers reveal. The first of these concerns the deliberate government misinformation (and plain lies): despite public denials of any ‘hit list’ of mines to be closed and despite assurances concerning the impact on jobs and communities by the ‘minimal closure programme’, National Coal Board chairman Ian MacGregor had in fact revealed such a list to Peter Walker, secretary of state for energy, six months before the start of the strike. There were actually 75 pits on the hit list that was said to be an invention of NUM president Arthur Scargill. The document is in fact quite specific in its details: “... two thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant, 35% of miners in Scotland, 48% in the north-east, 50% in South Yorkshire and 46% in South Midlands”. The papers also show that Thatcher was acutely aware of the need to maintain the deception and misinformation, in that she instructed Margaret Thatcher: miners in her sites Walker not to copy the document or circulate it and Peter Gregson of the cabinet office advised that it should not be referred to as such, and only non-recorded, oral briefings should be given. State mobilisation It is now established that Thatcher and her government deployed every arm of the state to combat the miners and undermine the strike. Two of her ‘policy unit’ plans were unfolded in July 1984. Policy unit chief John Redwood recommended use of the law against secondary action and picketing and a conjoined attack on NUM funds. So-called “working miners” - ie, blacklegs - were primed to go to court and challenge the NUM’s description of the strike as official. Thatcher herself had clearly been heading the attempt to avoid having to fight on two fronts at once - militants in other strategic unions were trying to coordinate their own action with that of the miners. Firstly Thatcher prevailed upon British Rail to make an increased offer to the rail unions in May 1984. Secondly she informed the cabinet that the national dock strike must be settled at all costs the National Dock Labour Scheme was guaranteed (only until after the miners had been defeated, of course). It should be noted as an aside here that, had the Immingham dockers refused to unload coke and iron ore onto scab lorries brought in to break a solidarity rail blockade after the signing of this agreement, we would have been on the road to a sensational victory. But the Immingham men defied their own union policy and broke the blockade - something which the government staked everything on.1 The papers reveal the degree to which Thatcher’s advisers - possibly even more rightwing and belligerent than herself - direct the war. Here are four statements by Redwood: “You cannot follow a strategy of encouraging a war of attrition … and of trying to find a fudged formula ... go back to the original strategy of a war of attrition, where the perceived way of the strike ending is for miners to go back to work” (July 13). “Speedier use of stipendiary magistrates and of legal processes, so that pickets can see their comrades being prosecuted and punished quickly for criminal offences … Examining the possibility of mounting a conspiracy charge against union leaders inciting pickets to violence” (August 29). “Encourage NCB to extend its threat of dismissal to all those not only convicted of criminal damage against Coal Board property, but also those convicted of serious offences against persons on picket lines or NCB property” (September 21). “It is vitally important the NCB should sack any miner convicted of violence against fellow NCB employers or property” October 3). One could add in regard to this last instruction that conviction was not necessary: only the charge was enough. Which led after the August village police occupations and police command HQs being established at pit heads, to managers pointing out militants and leaders on picket lines for snatch squads to target in the inevitable conflict at the gates and on the streets. Routledge in his section of the book highlights the cabinet instruction to the Association of Chief Police Officers which had launched a de facto coup against police committee control and regulation, and established a national police force to conduct its war against the NUM - that it should adopt “more vigorous interpretations of their duties”. He suggests, for instance, “stopping the movement of pickets and fitting up miners at Orgreave”. Nicholas Jones’s chapter on the cabinet papers, ‘Thatcher and the police’, is perhaps one of the most revealing. The strike was only one week old (and pushing all before it) when Thatcher personally intervened to “stiffen the resolve” of chief constables, who she believed were failing to provide police protection for blacklegs. MacGregor had gone whinging to Thatcher, complaining about the ease with which pickets had descended on working coalfields and closed them down. Similar complaints from Peter Walker had forced her to confess that she feared Scargill was about to repeat the miners’ success of 1972, when flying pickets plugged the gap in the blacking of scab fuel at Saltley Gate and defeated the government, in turn breaking its central ‘income policy’ strategy. Clearly chief constables had weighed up the priorities for each force in order to decide which areas demanded the greatest deployment. Ensuring one scab gets to work in a strike-bound village might not be anywhere near the top of the pile from their point of view, when they are faced with a high crime rate or an important criminal investigation. The cabinet papers for 1984 reveal that Thatcher berated police chiefs - she was “deeply disturbed” by the mass pickets sweeping the country. Within four days of her intervention police nationwide were mounting road blocks and stopping the movement of miners’ cars hundreds of miles from their destination on the basis that a “breach of the peace” was “likely to occur” (we should note that the mass movement of English Defence League supporters to attend demonstrations, where such a breach of the peace is almost inevitable, has not been met by road blocks and the turning back of cars or buses). At another ministerial meeting home secretary Leon Brittan reported that 7,245 police officers were on duty in Nottingham purely to keep the county’s mines working. The option of deploying police officers from various parts of the country by army helicopters was also discussed. Two months into the strike, the lord chancellor, Quintin Hogg, reported that there were concerns about the cases being presented to the courts by police in Nottinghamshire. By May 1984, over 900 arrests had been made in the Nottingham coalfield and Hogg advised Thatcher that the chief constable had “expressed reservations about the quality of some of the evidence upon which the arrests have been made, and for this reason is anxious for dates [for court proceedings] not to be fixed too soon”. Later the same day, however, Hogg’s letter was ‘amended’, to the effect that the chief constable was “anxious lest delay causes the quality of evidence available to deteriorate”. In fact it was the first version that was accurate - the chief constable himself stated that the quality of evidence to be presented to the courts could be highly significant in view of continued demands for inquiries into police activities during the strike. This was to prove highly prophetic, given the collapse of the Coal House and Orgreave trials, where police evidence was shown to be fabricated. I noted earlier how the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) had simply ignored elected council police committees, to which they were supposed to be accountable. When critical police committees in the strike areas tried to pull the police into line through their budgets, the government simply switched to directly funded police operations. For example, Orgreave was part of the thoroughly left-Labour South Yorkshire County Council, with its mining councillors. They passed a resolution that the Orgreave plant should cease operation for the duration of the strike and withdrew the authority of the chief constable to use his discretion to fund policing there. So Leon Brittan and attorney general Sir Michael Havers took covert steps to ensure the treasury would make good any funds required. Secret preparations Thatcher was on the brink of bringing in the army to move strike-locked stocks of coal at pit heads and power stations. It was a high-stake strategy - there were warnings of the possible consequences in terms of solidarity action and public disorder if strikers and their families confronted the armed forces on British streets. All documents relating to MI5, MI6, GCHQ, etc have been withheld. Despite this a few references to the security services have survived, indicating that their involvement was discussed. For example, it is clear that covert action was taken to try and stop the transfer of funds to the NUM from abroad and then, when that failed, to monitor them, along with the movement of all NUM officials leaving the country with the intention of gaining international support. In discussing the social implications of Orgreave Ray Riley refers to the 1981 Acpo conference. When the chief constables met in a private session to discuss “public order”, among the guests of honour were the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Hong Kong police’s infamous riot control unit. From this session emerged the Community Disorder Tactical Operations InterForce Working Group, specialising in the use of riot control and public order techniques. This developed the tactic of provoking fear and apprehension in a crowd, and produced the 1983 public order manual deployed during the Orgreave siege. All this was revealed by NUM defence lawyers in the riot cases brought against 96 victims of the police terror at Orgreave on June 18 1984. Settling scores may be short, but it is an explosive exposition, drawing out the hidden truths revealed by the cabinet papers. It makes you wonder why all those civil libertarians and establishment politicians who beat their chests over the liberty and democracy and fair play are not demanding action over such wanton abuse of state power or complaining about the obviously partisan intervention by institutions which are supposed to be separate from government. But the cabinet papers have produced hardly a whimper, despite their revelation of bare-faced lies and the manipulation of state bodies which profess impartiality and the upholding of ‘checks and balances’. I have only one criticism, and it is the same as the one I made in last week’s review 2: it is asserted that the Orgreave debacle was caused by steelworkers stabbing us in the back by using scab coke. The claim is almost word for word the one made by Mark Metcalf in Images of the miners’ strike. To be honest, this had been my assumption also until I actually researched the process of events which led to Orgreave. Nothing excuses the police ambush and horrific actions nor the fact that steelworkers accepted coke that had been smashed through picket lines past the bloodied heads and beaten bodies of miners’ pickets. However, it was Arthur who tore up the otherwise sound agreement to keep their furnaces intact using coke delivered by union train drivers, in return for not producing steel. This led us into a double trap: (1) the Orgreave ambush; and (2) allowing the solidarity nonsteel policy to be torn up, thus opening the scab floodgates. But this common mistake does not in any way detract from the value of the book, which I wholeheartedly recommend l David Douglass Notes 1. The NUM had perhaps overestimated the degree of solidarity and union culture among Immingham dockers. A full discussion of this is contained in my book, Ghost dancers (Hastings 2010). The dock strike was one of three occasions when the miners’ strike came within a whisker of winning. 2. ‘Inspirational collection’, March 20. 11 worker 1003 March 27 2014 weekly COMMUNIST PLATFORM Preparing for conference T he Communist Platform of Left Unity met on March 23 to try and arrive at a common attitude to the LU national conference a week later. In introducing the debate, Mike Macnair pointed out that the exact agenda had not yet been finalised, so there were bound to be unexpected items, including amendments, for which we were not prepared. Nevertheless, most of the motions were available, although it was clear that several topics would not be discussed through lack of time. That almost certainly applied to the policy commission resolutions, which had been placed at the bottom of the agenda. If, however, they were reached, comrade Macnair recommended a reference-back for all except the health commission resolution, which, although “imperfect”, was broadly acceptable. That could not be said of all the others, which betrayed their origins as the product of a committee - the ‘economy’ and ‘foreign policy’ resolutions in particular were truly dire. Comrade Macnair gave a comprehensive review of all the motions so far available - for his recommendations, which were largely accepted by the meeting, see his article on pp6-7. The only motion that provoked any real debate among CP supporters was the one emanating from Glasgow LU on the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) against Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people. No-one was against supporting this motion, but there were differences over the interpretation of such a campaign. Moshé Machover pointed out that it was perfectly acceptable to interpret it in a principled way that does not require “agreement with liberals” - Ian Donovan had previously suggested that BDS might imply a popular front, which banked on sections of the bourgeoisie taking action against Israel. Comrade Machover cited a couple of examples of such principled action: the boycott of the G4S company, which provides security and prison equipment to Israel’s oppressive apparatus; and of Veolia, which provides transport links to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Jack Conrad said that, while we should have no illusions that BDS will liberate Palestine, “symbols matter” - and we should “pick our cause” in the sense of highlighting particular campaigns. Farzad Kamangar was in general agreement, although she pointed out that blanket action - she mentioned a general academic boycott - could possibly “penalise the wrong people”. In this regard I said that some aspects of the general campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa were indeed misplaced: for example, the idea that telephone lines should be cut would have prevented working class and oppressed South Africans from communicating with each other internationally, while the regime and big business would have been able to get round such a ban. I suggested that individual campaigns should be carefully targeted - G4S and Veolia being good examples. Comrade Machover stated that, while BDS is mostly symbolic, it might actually force a change in policy - he could imagine ordinary Israelis saying to their rulers, “Your policies are isolating us”. Comrade Macnair pointed out that, while we might have reservations about BDS, they were insufficient for us to oppose Glasgow’s motion. “In the context of this conference”, we should support it. This was accepted by all present. There was a more general discussion about whether it is tactically correct to vote for an amendment to a motion that is itself insupportable, but the consensus appeared to be that it is perfectly reasonable to vote for such amendments and, even if they are successful, still vote against the substantive motion. It was reported to the meeting that there were big problems with the leadership elections that had been taking place. Firstly, LU’s labyrinthine constitution had not been adhered to in respect of nominations individual candidates should have been nominated by 20 members, but the transitional leadership had accepted just a proposer and seconder. As Mark Fischer commented, the constitution had effectively been “suspended”. Secondly, at least two candidates who had submitted their nominations had not appeared on the ballot paper. Comrade Macnair pointed out that this situation had not resulted from any democratic abuse, but from the chaos produced by a “dog’s dinner” of a constitution, itself arising from a “false conception of democratic practice”. We had warned that the constitution may be unworkable and it seems that we may already have been proved correct. Comrade Conrad added that we should not support moves to annul the whole process, even though one of our own comrades was among those whose nomination had been overlooked. The point of standing Communist Platform candidates was politics, not to demonstrate our legalistic versatility. Racism and the state Earlier the meeting had debated a motion from comrade Donovan that had been held over from the February 8 meeting of the CP, together with a counter-motion moved by James Turley. It was generally agreed that, while the debate on M’bala M’bala Dieudonné was now a little dated, it was important to air the issues and take a position. Comrade Donovan argued that the French comedian was being persecuted as a member of an oppressed minority. There had been attempts to outlaw his performances and he had been sent on the French equivalent of a ‘race awareness course’. And, of course, the UK state had banned him from entering the country. Comrade Donovan said that, while we should criticise Dieudonné’s evident antiSemitism, we should defend him against these attacks by the state. As a black man, Dieudonné was part of an oppressed minority, he continued. The bourgeoisie still needs racism to divide the working class and even its official anti-racism is itself racist. He contended that the “only operative version” of official anti-racism was opposition to antiSemitism. Unlike blacks, Jews do not get disproportionately stopped and searched. Comrade Turley’s motion was much shorter than the one proposed by comrade Donovan. After noting the UK ban on Dieudonné and the fact that he had been the “victim of state oppression in France”, it concluded: “While we oppose the anti-Semitic views promoted by Dieudonné, a figure on the fringes of the Front National, communists nevertheless strenuously resist state incursions on freedom of speech, which have been shown throughout modern history to serve not the interests of the working class, but its enemies.” In his contribution, comrade Turley stated that Ian was concentrating too much on the British context and missing the specific French situation. This produces people like Dieudonné, who are “beginning to flirt with fascism”. Comrade Machover thought that the whole affair raised two “interconnected, but separate issues”. The first was, “Can an oppressed minority be racist?” - to which he replied in the affirmative. There can arise a certain “triangulation” within an oppressed community: to gain approval from the majority certain elements may point the finger at a different oppressed community. He went on to say that, while ‘Paki-bashing’ - which may be carried out by a combination of black and white youths - was “politically undeveloped”, you could not say that about Dieudonné’s anti-Semitism, which was “politically calculated”: aimed at gaining support among the majority white population. That was why he thought the idea of the CP defending someone so reactionary, just because his father came from Cameroon, was “preposterous”. The second issue comrade Machover wanted to raise was the connection between Zionism and anti-Semitism (Dieudonné does not attack Zionism, he said: he attacks Jews). Comrade Machover stated that Ian Donovan seems to believe that “the Jews” have become an oppressor people. There is a truth here in relation to Palestine, but there they are oppressors as Zionists, not as Jews per se. He concluded that Israelapologists have long contended that to attack Zionism is to attack Jews - and now Ian is “saying the same thing in a different way”. In my intervention I wondered in what precise way Dieudonné could be said to be “oppressed”. He is a rich man, enjoying a privileged lifestyle, who has been targeted by the French state because of his politics. I strongly disputed comrade Donovan’s claim that the ruling class in Britain “still needs racism to divide the working class”. It is just plain wrong to say that blacks disproportionately die in custody or are targeted for stops and searches as a result of an officially sanctioned (and presumably secretly approved) racist policy. The real reason is a combination of the actions of individual racist police officers and the fact that blacks are disproportionally working class. Other comrades disagreed to one extent or another, including Ian, who said my point was “massively exaggerated”. Comrade Macnair disagreed less strongly, but thought that comrade Donovan’s position on Dieudonné could be compared to the insistence of some on the left on “prettifying the oppressed”, just as they prettify reactionary anti-imperialists. Dieudonné was once on the left, he said - but so was Benito Mussolini, while the name ‘National Socialists’ speaks for itself. In his reply, comrade Turley thought that the inferior position of blacks was not specifically about racism, but about their class position in society. He added that our criticism of official anti-racism should not be that it is in reality racist, but that it does not work. Comrade Donovan himself stated that “virtually nothing has changed on the ground” in relation to racism. The ruling class has “the power to change things if they really wanted to” - the implication being that they do not want to put a stop to racism either in the police or elsewhere in society. In response to the point made by comrade Machover about viewing Jews as an oppressor people, he said that there was indeed an element of national consciousness about many Jews’ attachment to Israel. In the end, however, comrade Donovan was the only one to vote for his motion, while comrade Turley’s was passed overwhelmingly. Peter Manson [email protected] Fighting fund N Handsome oting that it is only a couple of weeks since the our paper celebrated its 1,000th issue, comrade MG writes in the letter accompanying his donation: “Towards the 10,000th edition of the Weekly Worker!” The £5 note MG enclosed may be modest, but the ambition he expressed is quite the opposite. Someone whose expressions of admiration are more restrained, but whose largesse is more pronounced, is a reader in Italy, comrade AG, who sent us a €200 cheque to pay for his annual subscription and for three CPGB books, with the remainder to go towards the Weekly Worker fighting fund. Converting euros into pounds and doing the subtraction, I reckon that leaves a handsome £48 for our March fund. And AG wasn’t the only one to add a little something to his resubscription. Comrade JH bumped up his cheque by £20. Then there was the £25 donated via PayPal by DB (who was one of 12,040 online readers last week) and - last, but not least £277 in standing orders. A special mention must go to comrade SK, whose generous monthly donation accounts for most of that. All in all, £375 came in last week, which takes our total to £1,201. So we have just four days to get the £300 we need to reach our £1,500 target. I am hoping readers and supporters will react speedily to my plea to ensure we get that money by 5pm on Monday March 31. Follow DB’s example and click on our PayPal icon, make a transfer from your online account (to 00744310; sort code 30-99-64), or hand over your contribution in person at our stall at the Left Unity conference on Saturday l See you there! Robbie Rix Fill in a standing order form (back page), donate via our website, or send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker What we fight for n Without organisation the working class is nothing; with the highest form of organisation it is everything. n There exists no real Communist Party today. There are many so-called ‘parties’ on the left. In reality they are confessional sects. Members who disagree with the prescribed ‘line’ are expected to gag themselves in public. Either that or face expulsion. n Communists operate according to the principles of democratic centralism. Through ongoing debate we seek to achieve unity in action and a common world outlook. As long as they support agreed actions, members should have the right to speak openly and form temporary or permanent factions. n Communists oppose all imperialist wars and occupations but constantly strive to bring to the fore the fundamental question - ending war is bound up with ending capitalism. n Communists are internationalists. Everywhere we strive for the closest unity and agreement of working class and progressive parties of all countries. We oppose every manifestation of national sectionalism. It is an internationalist duty to uphold the principle, ‘One state, one party’. n The working class must be organised globally. Without a global Communist Party, a Communist International, the struggle against capital is weakened and lacks coordination. n Communists have no interest apart from the working class as a whole. They differ only in recognising the importance of Marxism as a guide to practice. That theory is no dogma, but must be constantly added to and enriched. n Capitalism in its ceaseless search for profit puts the future of humanity at risk. Capitalism is synonymous with war, pollution, exploitation and crisis. As a global system capitalism can only be superseded globally. n The capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away by a parliamentary vote. n We will use the most militant methods objective circumstances allow to achieve a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, a united, federal Ireland and a United States of Europe. n Communists favour industrial unions. Bureaucracy and class compromise must be fought and the trade unions transformed into schools for communism. n Communists are champions of the oppressed. Women’s oppression, combating racism and chauvinism, and the struggle for peace and ecological sustainability are just as much working class questions as pay, trade union rights and demands for high-quality health, housing and education. n Socialism represents victory in the battle for democracy. It is the rule of the working class. Socialism is either democratic or, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, it turns into its opposite. n Socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism - a system which knows neither wars, exploitation, money, classes, states nor nations. Communism is general freedom and the real beginning of human history. Printed and published by November Publications Ltd (07950 416922). Registered as a newspaper by Royal Mail. ISSN 1351-0150. © March 2014 worker weekly No 1003 March 27 2014 Left Unity’s labrynthine constitution wreaks havoc Less haste, more politics F or a comprehensive and reliable account of the March 16 meeting of the transitional national council - Left Unity’s interim leadership readers are again directed to Peter McLaren’s report on the Independent Socialist Network website.1 However, there are some important political points that need to be added to the comrade’s record, as they address issues that will have a direct bearing on LU’s policy conference in Manchester on Saturday March 29. First, this TNC was smaller than the one that preceded it. This is a general tendency, apparently. Just 33 comrades, representing 22 LU branches, turned out. The absence of leading LUers such as Andrew Burgin, Kate Hudson and Guy Harper - no doubt for perfectly valid reasons - was also noteworthy. On the same theme, there was clearly some disquiet in the room at the apparent loss of the organisation’s forward momentum when Socialist Resistance comrade Terry Conway reported that, as of the evening before the TNC, just 162 people had registered for the policy conference (the Manchester hall holds around 300). As I have written before, the Chaos whole LU project is characterised by ill-advised haste.2 This, of course, entire election process to the new NC currently in the painstaking process its growth - not terribly radical in itself Republican Socialist Platform) that a is an understandable product of the had been run on the basis of the wrong of becoming registered as a party with and readily endorsed by the meeting. ‘yes’ victory would be progressive, as frustration felt by some sections of the constitution - the version agreed at the the electoral commission, a slip like However, according to the comrade, it would lead to the break-up of the extra-Labour left when it surveys the LU founding conference3 stipulated running an entire internal election “if we stop growing, we will stagnate”. UK state and be a blow to the Torymiserable failures of the unity projects that 20 signatories were needed for for an important component part of He even put a figure on the required Lib Dem government. Others declared initiated since the mid-1990s. the nomination, not just two, as stated your national leadership on the basis numbers: LU must “aim for 5,000 themselves to be neutral on the whole But some sober reflection and in the online document. Somewhere of the wrong constitution could have members by the end of the year” and question. patience would be rather more along the line in the constitution’s damaging ramifications. if we don’t hit it, the organisation will Exactly the sort of opportunist productive. LU is creating real journey onto the LU website, a zero The urgent need in LU is to create be “in trouble”. concessions to petty nationalism that are problems for itself. It has lumbered apparently went walkabout. Again, far more space for thorough-going Well, it is a certainty that LU will typical of our contemporary left, in other itself with a complicated constitution Pete is accurate when he reports political discussion and clarification. not have 5,000 members by the end words. Rather than fret about inflated that assumes a much larger organisation that “it was ... recommended that we The time for debate at the TNC itself of this year - if you are talking about targets for membership growth and dark with intricately combined sections, continue the election process because was very squeezed and - predictably - real, dues-paying, politically activated warnings of the dire consequences of able to meet binding constitutional the error was made in good faith”, but the three-minute rule will again apply and organised members, a couple of failure, LU comrades should pay far obligations on gender quotas, regional this potentially does not end the matter. for movers of motions at the March 29 hundred is more likely. But then the more serious attention to the core politics representations and so on. For instance, The TNC agreed unanimously conference (two minutes for movers of size of the membership is only one of their new formation l the TNC had to agree that, following with Terry Conway’s proposal that all amendments, one minute for speakers way to judge the political health of Mark Fischer conference, LU must re-open LUers are informed of the error and from the floor - if we are lucky). In this an organisation. The “trouble” we nominations for those posts where the March 29 conference itself takes context, perhaps the TNC contribution currently have in LU is political, as [email protected] there were insufficient candidates in the the final decision on the legitimacy that best illustrated the mess resulting perfectly illustrated by the truncated recent internal elections - the appeals or otherwise of the whole electoral from LU’s topsy-turvy set of priorities debate at the TNC on the Scottish committee, the east region, London, the process. The potential for disruption came from comrade Mike Scott. independence referendum. In that, a 1. www.independentsocialistnetwork.org. See my report of the last TNC in the February 13 north-east, the north-west, Scotland, the and challenges from understandably He made a suggestion for a clear majority of the comrades in the 2. issue of this paper - particularly my comment that south-east and the south-west. Quite disgruntled members should not “forward planning working party” to room agreed with Mark France of LU “is an organisation in far too much of a hurry”. a few of the original places up for be underestimated and, as LU is increase the profile of LU and promote Worcester LU (and Steve Freeman’s 3. See Weekly Worker December 5 2013. election, in other words. Similarly, this small organisation UK subscribers: Pay by standing order and save £12 a has attempted to run online elections for a variety of national positions and year. Minimum £12 every 3 months... but please pay places on its leadership - a process that was always fraught with the potential more if you can. Your paper needs you! for cock-up ... and so it has transpired, unfortunately. Terry Conway’s report To ____________________________ Bank plc _________________ I enclose payment: 6m1yr Inst. on these elections highlighted several quite serious problems. For example, UK £30/€35£60/€70£200/€220 Sub £/€ __________ a number of legitimately nominated Branch Address _____________________ Europe £43/€50 £86/€100£240/€264 comrades (including a Communist Donation £/€ __________ _____________________________________ Post code _________ Platform supporter) had been left off Rest of £65/€75£130/€150£480/€528 world the ballot for the 15 directly elected Re Account Name _________________________________________ Total £/€ __________ New UK subscribers offer: members of the national council. These were accepted as honest errors Sort code ________________ Account No ______________ Date ____________________ and the general feeling of the meeting is that we needed to press ahead with Please pay to Weekly Worker, Lloyds TSB A/C No 00744310 Name __________________________________________________ the situation as it now stands - with the sort code 30-99-64, the sum of £ ______ every month*/3 months* exception of the disputes committee Address ________________________________________________ until further notice, commencing on ______________ election, which will be rerun on the basis of the existing nominations, but This replaces any previous order from this account. (*delete) ______________________________ Post code ________________ with the addition of a comrade whose Signed ______________________ Name (PRINT) _______________ consent to nomination and election Email _________________________ Tel _____________________ statement had been sent on time, but Date _______________________ Address _____________________ not to the designated LU address. Send a cheque or postal order payable to ‘Weekly Worker’ to: Even more seriously, Pete McLaren Weekly Worker, Box 928, London WC1N 3XX, UK. _________________________________________________________ pointed out to the meeting that the Notes Subscribe here 3 months for £10 Standing order
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