Letters
Voting and BNP
I am no more enthusiastic about the ‘alternative vote’ electoral system being proposed by New Labour than Dave Womersley, but he provides no evidence at all to support his assertion that AV would give “undue advantage to the British National Party” (Letters, October 22).
AV is based on single-member constituencies, with voters indicating their order of preference for the candidates on the ballot paper. If no candidate achieves more than half of the total first-preference votes, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their supporters’ later preferences are redistributed to other candidates until one emerges with more than 50%. So majority support is required to be elected.
By contrast, the multi-member, constituency-based ‘single transferable vote’ system favoured by Dave Womersley sets a much lower threshold for electoral success. If the practices established in Ireland were followed, it is likely that three to five-member constituencies would be used for UK parliamentary elections conducted under STV. Constituencies of this size would require candidates to achieve between 17% and 25% of the votes in order to be elected - a much lower proportion than needed under AV and therefore a much easier target for the BNP.
Moreover, it is reasonable to anticipate that, as AV removes the fear of splitting the vote by allowing people to transfer allegiance to their second and third favourite candidates, many voters would order their preferences to prioritise anti-fascist candidates, making it far more difficult for a BNP representative to be elected than under the current first-past-the-post system. Under AV, they’d need 50% support in the face of an electorate able to transfer its votes to the strongest anti-fascist candidate, whereas under FPTP they only need to win more votes than any individual rival and there is no possibility of their opponents pooling support.
So I think it’s pretty obvious that AV, whatever its other faults may be, offers no advantage to the BNP at all. Unless it was already in a position to command majority support, in which case the mechanics of the electoral system wouldn’t matter all that much anyway, AV has to be the BNP’s least favourite electoral system.
All the same, I too would prefer STV over AV or FPTP because it’s a proportional system that enables voters to influence not only the party political balance, but also the nature of the candidate slates being put forward within parties.
I would, however, question why Dave Womersley appears to be believe that thwarting the BNP should be a primary objective when designing an electoral system. Surely the main purpose of elections should be to ensure that the political views of the electorate are reflected in the elected body and the best means of achieving that would be a proportional system that doesn’t set artificial thresholds to exclude minority currents of opinion. A system - like AV or FPTP - that keeps out the far right is just as likely to exclude the left and I don’t see how having a parliament almost entirely free of socialists, as we have now, can be beneficial to the cause of anti-fascism. We have a parliament full of people who, instead of challenging its central arguments, believe that the only way to fight the BNP is to pander to prejudice and echo its sentiments, with the mainstream parties constantly boasting about how tough they are on ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘bogus asylum-seekers’ and suchlike.
The BNP may not be represented in parliament, but much of its agenda has already been adopted by the so-called mainstream parties. Who in parliament today is able to speak for those who oppose immigration controls? Better to give the BNP the parliamentary presence warranted by its support, but also make it possible to elect leftwing MPs who will offer a genuine Marxist perspective and speak out against the racists’ agenda instead of trying to coopt it, as the larger parties have done.
Steve Cooke
Stockton-on-Tees
Not proportional
Dave Wormersley’s point that AV might give “undue advantage to the British National Party” is actually the opposite of the truth - New Labour politicians have justified it on the grounds that it would make it more difficult for the BNP. AV is designed to favour moderate parties and the left would, of course, suffer too. Though sometimes called a form of proportional representation, it is not at all proportional and one study showed that Labour would have had an even bigger landslide in 1997 if that general election had been conducted using AV!
Like me, Dave favours “the much better ‘single transferable vote’ system proposed by the Electoral Reform Society”. As well as being fairer, it gives voters the opportunity to choose between candidates of the same party, removing power from party machines. No need for the ‘primaries’ that the Tories have started introducing.
Under STV, Joe Higgins was elected in the Irish Republic, twice to the Dáil and this year to the European parliament, despite being in a fairly small party (the Socialist Party), and other candidates to the left of the mainstream parties achieved victories in local elections across Ireland this year too. Keeping the left out is surely a motivation of New Labour politicians rather than just the BNP.
Eddie Ford (‘Second-rate response to second-rate fuhrer’, October 29) pointed out that “a Daily Telegraph poll suggested that 22% of the electorate would ‘seriously consider’ voting BNP” in the wake of leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question time. While Eddie is correct to be concerned about this, let’s keep a sense of proportion. The same poll showed that only 3% would vote BNP if there was an election tomorrow! Media bias can of course give a boost to fascism, and the ITV news the day after Griffin’s appearance only gave the large figure.
Due to the advantage a genuine form of PR such as STV gives to both extremes, left and right, it looks very unlikely that the capitalist parties will introduce it. Although STV remains a policy of the Liberal Democrats, leader Nick Clegg has indicated he would not insist on PR as a condition of entering a coalition government. I advocate STV more as a policy we should introduce after a socialist revolution (alongside participatory democracy and internet referenda) than a demand we can expect to win under capitalism.
Part of our strategy to defeat the BNP has to be countering their arguments on immigration. Unfortunately, the left has usually only made points without justifying them (like the SWP slogan, ‘Asylum-seekers welcome here’) or used moral arguments (like ‘Capital can move anywhere in the world so why shouldn’t workers?’) - good up to a point, but we need to think strategically about how to achieve our goals as well.
It would be electoral suicide to call for ‘open borders’ on an election leaflet without justifying such a position, and I would suggest that people coming to the UK from all over the world with their wealth of experiences helps radicalise people - and, after helping us foment revolution here, they can return and overthrow their leaders back home! Once again, capitalist politicians are not going to implement such a policy, so perhaps we should focus discussion and arguments on what a socialist government should do in a mainly capitalist world or a mainly or fully socialist world.
Steve Wallis
Manchester
Stand
I would like to make some points regarding the CPGB’s recent aggregate (‘Looking to 2010’, October 29).
Firstly, I must disagree with John Bridge’s comments. Anyone with an ear to the ground knows that New Labour will be wiped out in the 2010 general election, just as it was in 1931.
Secondly, I agree with Anne Mc Shane: the CPGB must stand candidates in 2010. Not being able to use ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ on the ballot paper is a red herring. I suggest that the CPGB registers ‘Communist Alternative’ as a description with the electoral commission as soon as possible. If that is not possible, then the CPGB should re-register the description it used in the 1999 European elections - i.e.‘Weekly Worker’.
Finally, whatever the description on the ballot paper, I suggest that the CPGB stands candidates in its three student strongholds of Manchester, Oxford and London.
John Smithee
Cambridgeshire
Inspiration
In last week’s paper I asked you to get your fingers out and stand some candidates in the next general election (Letters, October 29).
In the same edition, you reported that one of your elders, John Bridge, explained to Communist Students present at a CPGB aggregate that, “due to the failure of the student left, it was often not possible for CS to direct its work through the rest of the left in the way the CPGB aims to” (‘Looking to 2010’, October 29).
Which I presume answers my question. The “rest of the left” have not failed and you can “work through” them. It’s just a matter of a few months working out how and who to work through, or over, or on.
You certainly know how to fire up and inspire new comrades!
Vivian Bolus
The Rotten Elements
Free speech
“Comrades should learn the lessons - denying the far right a platform is a tactic, which may be appropriate under certain circumstances,” says James Turley (‘Timely questioning of no-platform fetish’, October 29).
The Socialist Party of Great Britain is wholeheartedly in favour of the fullest freedom of speech. This is because we hold that out of full and free discussion of today’s social problems only one valid conclusion can emerge and that is that socialism alone will provide the framework within which they can be solved. Full free speech means exactly what it says - that any and every view should be allowed expression so they can be examined and shown to be wrong.
People who deny the validity of our position of combating racism by calm, open argument are in effect denying that workers are capable of being convinced rationally of the error of racism. The ultimate basis of all arguments for censorship (and the call for the BNP to be prevented from expressing its views is a call for censorship) is the assumption that people are too stupid or irresponsible or immature to make up their own minds and that some superior body must therefore decide for them. Some argue that there may be little difference between those who describe themselves as the ‘vanguard’ and those who prefer to call themselves the ‘spearhead’ when it comes to political democracy.
Suffering from bad housing, poor hospital services, poor schools or whatever, and having seen the immigration of black or brown people into their areas, some workers mistakenly link the two together and conclude that it is immigrants who are causing their problems. So workers with racist ideas are workers who, in their search for an explanation and solution to their problems, have reached a mistaken conclusion. The BNP are also the product of all the reformist parties’ failure to make capitalism a fit society to live in. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from failed promises and expectations, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of the BNP and the quick fix they offer?
Mere anti-racist propaganda on its own can’t be effective. It offers no solution to the problems and frustrations which drive some workers to embrace racism. It leaves unchallenged the cause (capitalism), while trying to deal with the effect (racism). The only effective way to combat racism, then, is to propagate socialism.
Alan Johnstone
email
Next step
It has been well argued in the Weekly Worker that ‘no platform for the BNP’ is a tactic which can backfire on the left; that any demonstrations against free speech for fascists will eventually appear as part of the problem, and the left will be seen to be acting against democracy.
So where do we go from here? I suggested in my previous letter (October 29) that the most obvious solution is to defeat the BNP at its electoral base.
Tony Travers’ article, ‘How Labour lost the white working class’ (Evening Standard October 30) is required reading for the left and its allies because of its strategy for defeating neo-fascism. Prof Travers notes that mass migration needs to be properly managed and explained, and that the white working class often feels marginalised, abandoned and then condemned as ‘racist’ in facing housing and job shortages. The activist base of the Labour Party has shrunk, leaving a vacuum in specific areas for the BNP to exploit, win over and mislead the most vulnerable people.
So the next step for the left and its anti-fascist allies is to pool resources and focus on getting candidates elected, using tactical voting if necessary, to defeat the BNP in all those areas of the country where it has met success. This is an opportunity for the left to show that it has the ability to lead the campaign to defeat the BNP. And if it can succeed by demonstrating the required strategy and the needed degree of unity and leadership, it can then go on to convince the electorate that it has the best programme to solve the crucial social, economic, political and ecological problems of our day.
Palmiro Mansi
London
Prejudiced
In Eddie Ford’s article on the rightwing English Defence League, racists and nationalists were put in the same category as ‘lumpen’ elements, with the latter described as “intoxicated football hooligans and semi-criminal riff-raff” (‘A symptom of capitalist decay, not the main enemy’, October 15).
Is this not engaging in your own form of snobbery? For one thing, I have noticed that with the Leninist left (such a mentality does not seem to be shared by anarchists) these terms are often used as a put-down and as terms of abuse. Perhaps in Marx’s day the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ had more of a meaning, but bear in mind the kind of background he himself came from and the class prejudices he likely carried.
Note that this letter is not a personal attack on Eddie Ford - I’ve seen the same mentality expressed not only in your paper, but among your milieu in general. I also recall the term ‘semi-lumpen’ being used in an article by another left group to describe people in low-paid jobs with little or no security. Snobbery is at its most pompous and patronising when it is dressed in red rather than the traditional grey or black.
A ‘lumpenproletarian’ is a working class person who is unemployed and poor. How does this equate with being an intoxicated hooligan who gets off on fighting during a ball game or being a “semi-criminal”? Not all men who engage in soccer violence are poor or unemployed, so the term would be inadequate there. As for “semi criminal”, it depends on your definition, as not all who engage in part-time crime - petty or large - are lacking a day job.
‘Petty criminal’ is a term I’ve often heard, but ‘semi-criminal’ is a rarer term that seems to be confined to your jargon. I think it translates into everyday use as ‘petty criminal’, because, of course, organised criminals are not poor! Would such a criminal be considered worthy of your respect because they are either bourgeois or middle class?
There is more petty crime in the midst of a recession because there is more unemployment and people have less spare cash. Desperate people do what they can to get by. Most people who engage in petty crime work pretty hard and don’t do it for the love of it. And they run a higher risk of getting caught than do your ‘Mr Bigs’, as well as making less money.
But, hell, go on and throw scorn at people who are poor and desperate. The poorer and more marginalised you are, the easier a target you become for the politicos of both right and left. You’ll find that most people who are poor express a hatred for all politicians. Is it any wonder when every day they are assailed by the media and there is no break from that even in your small-circulation paper?
Sorry, but I take offence at any form of prejudice, and that includes yours as much as the EDL’s. Thanks for reminding me yet again that you are not on the side of the poor.
Elizabeth Hoskings
email
Your call
While the Socialist Party’s Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and the CPGB’s Campaign for a Marxist Party are defunct, a new campaign has started up under the name, Call for a New Anti-capitalist Party.
The name gives a hint to the goal - creating a party similar to the New Anti-capitalist Party in France. The Workers Power group (affiliated with the League for the Fifth International) is mostly behind the effort. However, I wonder whether the goal is really to create a new anti-capitalist party or to create a new ‘old Labour’. The intention apparently is to get trade unions on board. But if you let the trade union bureaucracy decide your politics - as with the RMT’s ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ project - then you end up with a very watered-down, barely left message.
Communists must take the reins of the party and direct it. The left has more to gain from a merger of communist parties than a political coalition of trade unions. A new anti-capitalist party, like the NPA in France, must not be a coalition of trade unions but a broad party of the anti-capitalist left.
The talk of ‘left unity’ from Workers Power might leave one sceptical, since the Permanent Revolution group came to existence after they were expelled from Workers Power because they did not share WP’s opinion that capitalism was in a period of stagnation and that the world was in a pre-revolutionary period (a position taken not during the current recession, but in 2003 at the League for a Fifth International conference).
The CPGB should take this opportunity to participate and try to influence the project. However, it should point out that, just because a political party or electoral coalition has a trade union behind it (like the RMT), that doesn’t mean it has more anti-capitalist or proletarian credentials. What matters is that the party’s membership is proletarian and devoted to the cause of anti-capitalism. Getting the support of trade unions should be secondary.
Stancel Spencer
email
Open letter to IST
As you might be aware, the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe held its elective annual members’ conference (NMC) on November 2 2008. Our South Africa and Botswana comrades were the returning officers.
The election ushered in a new leadership, which was purely proletarian. However, within days, some aggrieved elements opposed to the active participation of the organisation in workers’ struggles - who had been deposed from leading roles - launched a counterrevolutionary tactic to reverse the democratic expression of the members’ conference.
Our working rules entitle the national coordinator to be full-time in charge of the day-to-day coordination from the national office. But this never happened, as the old technocrats refused the newly elected coordinator access. Munyaradzi Gwisai went on to personalise the password to the organisation’s email address.
Gwisai was found guilty of misconduct and expelled from the organisation. The case against him was democratically handled in accordance with our constitution, in which there is a provision of appeal.
After several unsuccessful attempts to resolve the impasse the membership took it upon themselves to force their entry into the ISO offices and take back their assets - according to the working rules, the national coordinator and treasurer are the custodians of the organisation’s assets.
Despite his expulsion Gwisai convened a faction meeting of members of the ISO to provide a cover for him to be elected as chair of the Zimbabwe chapter of the World Social Forum. Gwisai is also the deputy chair of the land commission of the imperialist-backed bourgeois process to rewrite Zimbabwe’s constitution.
In response to our working class action and probably after he was convinced that the membership of the organisation was totally against him, he resorted to the use of the state machinery - the police and the central intelligence department. We were never tempted to seek help from the state machinery, although the laws of Zimbabwe were and are in our favour. We choose to remain faithful to the fundamental principle that we only respect proletarian justice.
Gwisai fabricated a story that the newly elected members of the organisation had forcibly entered into the premises of his private law firm (Zimbabwe Labour Centre), and stole its assets and huge amounts of money. Thus a docket for unlawful entry and theft was opened against Adonia Mutero (national coordinator), Fortune Rera (treasurer) and Lovemore Manjonjo (youth coordinator). The leadership spent four days in prison under difficult conditions.
Several consultative meetings have been held to try and come up with the best way consistent with our practices to deal with the case. A resolution was not easy to arrive at, as there were those amongst our membership who misunderstood the principled way of resolving conflicts in a revolutionary organisation like ours. However, after several months of debate and consultation with other comrades within and without the International Socialist Tendency we have finally arrived at the following conclusions that we strongly feel are consistent with our principles.
We have resolved:
(a) that the court case is a case between a revolutionary working class organisation (ISO) and the oppressive state of Zimbabwe, with Gwisai - who has for years been posing as one of us - leading the state evidence;
(b) that the actions of Mr Gwisai and his clique are aimed at liquidating revolutionary voices in Zimbabwe and the entire region;
(c) that we are not in favour of bourgeois courts resolving the dispute;
(d) that even in the worst scenario that the case proceeds to the bourgeois courts, the accused comrades will not lead any evidence against Gwisai;
(e) that we will not lay any criminal charges against Gwisai in the bourgeois courts;
(f) that an assembly of ISO members is best positioned to deal with the matter;
(g) that even if Gwisai succeeds in his endeavour to incarcerate the leading members of the ISO, the assembly of working class members shall proceed to determine the issue;
(h) that we will agree to anything that will result in the assets of the organisation being removed from the hands of the state. Thus we have no problem in surrendering the assets to Gwisai;
(i) that we will inform our fraternal organisations of this decision and will seek their continued support.
(j) that we call on the International Socialist Tendency in particular and the world working class in general to condemn the actions of Gwisai. What disturbs us is that the IST is keeping quiet, although they are fully aware of the use of the bourgeois courts against us.
(k) that the national coordinating committee has the full right to convene an international tribunal to judge the actions of Gwisai and whomsoever in the International Socialist Tendency supports him.
ISO National Coordinating Committee
Zimbabwe
Shaky
Tony Clark is on very shaky ground when he tries to defend the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’ by quoting Lenin’s On cooperation (Letters, October 29).
Lenin says: “Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc - is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society out of cooperatives, out of cooperatives alone …? Is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society? It is still not the building of socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for it. ...”
In the Communist manifesto, Marx and Engels, having set out the contradictory forces that result in class war, state categorically that “Socialism is inevitable”. But are we to take these words at face value? No, of course not. Socialism is only inevitable if workers engage in class struggle, achieve the necessary level of class-consciousness and overthrow the existing social relations.
But the same is true of Lenin’s comments here. He makes sure to point out that state power and cooperatives are necessary and sufficient for building socialism, but that “It is still not the building of socialist society.” Why is it not? For the same reason that simply building cooperatives as individual units within a capitalist society cannot simply lead to the peaceful replacement of capitalist with socialist relations. The bosses will resist by whatever means are necessary, particularly when their rule is actually threatened.
If the USSR were simply left in peace for a century or so, then, given the conditions that Lenin sets out, there is no reason why it could not have arrived at socialism. But it is precisely because as Marxists we are not utopians that we recognise that this fundamental condition could never apply. A grown lion can see off a pack of hounds. But that is why the hounds will attack the lion cub, not the full-grown lion. The question was how a revolutionary leadership should deal with that reality.
Lenin was quite clear that the threat of intervention could only be defeated by international revolution, not by ‘peaceful co-existence’ or doing deals with imperialism in order to avoid it engaging in such attacks.
Stalin’s approach was the exact opposite. Tony refers to the betrayals of workers in China, Britain, Germany, Spain and so on, and he argues that none of these could be put down to Stalin seeking to do such deals with imperialism. There is actually a lot of documentary evidence to show they were precisely that. Either way, there is no disputing that that is exactly what the Hitler-Stalin pact was: a complete abandonment of the German working class in order to do a deal with Nazism to avoid an attack on the USSR. There is no doubt that that is what the Comintern’s directive to the French Communist Party to join with the French fascists was. Similarly, the instruction to the CPGB to oppose strikes in 1941 and the various agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Potsdam, Yalta, etc. These were precisely to sell out the international revolution in order to avoid imperialist attacks on the USSR, even though it was predictable to everyone other than Stalin that the pact with Hitler would not succeed anyway.
Lenin’s statement about state power and cooperatives can only be viewed if understood within those limits. Moreover, it assumes that this process of development takes place while capitalism stands still - something that Lenin could view as possible, as he thought it had reached its limits - whereas, in fact, capitalism was able not only to enjoy a further spurt of growth but to outgrow the USSR. It also assumed that state power actually resided under the political control of the workers, but, of course, it did not. It fell under the political control of former tsarists and a usurping bureaucracy. In other words, all of the ‘slips between cup and lip’ that have to be taken into consideration in understanding Marx’s statements about the ‘inevitability’ of socialism apply here.
Tony Clark, unfortunately, in failing to take those things into consideration, stands in part on the ground of the utopian socialists, who believed that we would be left in peace to develop our little Icaria, and in part on the ground of Bernstein, who took Marx at his word about the inevitability of socialism and concluded it was simply a process of evolution.
Arthur Bough
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